Camille Pissarro

Mr. Howard B. Davis, New York

Durand-Ruel, New York (on deposit from the above on March 2, 1898)

Mr. Erwin Davis, New York

Durand-Ruel, New York (acquired from the above on January 7, 1899) 

Frank Hadley Ginn and Cornelia Root Ginn, Cleveland (acquired from the above on March 6, 1925)

Thence by descent (sold: Christie’s, New York, May 8, 2000, lot 4)

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

New York, Durand-Ruel Galleries, Exhibition of paintings by Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley, 1925, no. 10

New York, Durand-Ruel Galleries, Loan Exhibition of French Masterpieces of the late XIX Century for the benefit of the Building fund of the French Hospital of New York, 1928, no. 15 (titled Maison de campagne)

Tokyo, Isetan Museum of Art; Fukuoka, Municipal Museum of Art; and Kyoto, Municipal Museum of Art, Retrospective Camille Pissarro, 1984, no. 38

The present work was painted at Osny, a small wheat-growing village northwest of Paris near Pontoise.  Completed in 1883, Paysage à Osny près de l’abreuvoir is one of the most accomplished works of Pissarro’s last "Pontoise Period" before the artist left the region in 1884 for Eragny.  The rich tapestry of interwoven brushstrokes and saturated impasto create the myriad effects of dappled light passing through the trees.  While the lush and tactile qualities draw the eye to the surface of the canvas, Pissarro still maintains a balance between the physical nature of the paint itself and the complex spatial effects within the picture frame.  These qualities position this picture both at the height of his first Impressionist phase and presage his experiments with Pointillism a few years later . 

The early 1880s were important years of re-evaluation for several of the painters of the Impressionist movement.  Monet and Renoir, in search of new inspiration, each traveled to the south seeking new and varied light conditions (see fig.1).  Pissarro remained in the environs of Paris, focusing on the evolution of his technique.  This picture clearly illustrates the artist’s developments during the years 1880-85: "Firstly regarding the compositions, there is less emphasis on recession and spatial depth.  The basic elements – foreground, middle distance and background – tend to be flattened, so that the design is read upwards as a series of horizontal bands… Pissarro’s technique continues to evolve in favor of small, evenly distributed, and heavily loaded brushstrokes sometimes applied in parallel" (Camille Pissarro, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1981, p. 116). 

Pissarro was one of the most accomplished landscapists among the Impressionists, and Paysage à Osny près de l’abreuvoir is a superb example of his affinity for this genre.  Thematically similar to the work of Jean-François-Millet (fig. 2) and the Barbizon painters, his landscapes depict the natural beauty of the French countryside and the laborers who tended the land.  Pissarro, however, chose to examine the complexity of space and perspective in a manner that was rare among the artists who explored this subject in the past.  In this painting, the artist carefully constructed the scene through an interplay of vertical, horizontal and diagonal elements.  Each aspect of the landscape is carefully framed and positioned, from the peasant figures to the left of center who are bordered by two thin trees that appear to curve in opposition to each other, to the pyramidal shape formed by the crisscrossing, darkened trees to the right of center.  These vertical elements are set against the shallow field of receding horizontal planes formed by the green foreground, the blond strip of the earthen path and the low stone wall and complex of houses running through the center.  Pissarro has slightly raised the perspective of the viewer, making our eye level with the darkened windows of the houses, as the ground appears to tilt down out of the picture plane. 

While closely related to his landscapes of the previous decade, the advancement in Pissarro’s compositions can be illustrated in a comparison between the present work and a magnificent early landscape, La route de Rocquencourt of 1871 (fig. 3, sold at Sotheby's Ne York, May 2003).  In the 1871 picture, the composition appears to orient itself to a single vanishing point (the horse drawn cart just at the horizon).  In Paysage à Osny près de l’abreuvoir there is no evident vanishing point that anchors the orthogonals – in fact as the eye wanders across the composition, the viewer finds multiple focal points that serve as centers to individual pockets of space.  In the 1871 painting, the trees recede in an orderly fashion along a gentle diagonal toward the horizon, while the 1883 work is so densely populated by a variety of trees and fauna that areas verge on abstraction.  Finally, the Rocquencourt landscape hold mass and density in the lower half of the painting, while the Osny scene is weighted at the top with a mass of leaves that obscure the sky, leaving the open area mainly in the lower third of the canvas.  Both paintings superbly represent the pictorial aims of Pissarro during their respective decades. 

Toward the end of the 1870s, Pissarro began to fill his broad open landscapes with a tangle of overlapping trees and buildings.  With regard to this development, Christopher Lloyd and Anne Distel write "It is as though Pissarro deliberately set himself the task of creating a visual clarity out of a confused and tangled web of natural forms.  Yet this overlaying of the figures against the background is, like the screening of surfaces, a logical development from Pissarro’s earlier work…Pissarro shows that having matched Cézanne during the 1870s, he can now equal Monet in dexterity of hand and acuity of eye" (Camille Pissarro, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1981, p. 116). 

Comparables:

Fig. 1, Claude Monet, Vue de Bennencourt, 1887, oil on canvas, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio

Fig. 2, Jean-Francois Millet, End of the Hamlet of Gruchy II, 1866, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Fig. 3, Camille Pissarro, La Route de Rocquencourt, 1871, oil on canvas, Private Collection; sold: Sotheby's, New York, May 6, 2003, lot 7, for $5,500,000