Camille Pissarro

Durand-Ruel, Paris  (acquired from the artist on November 23, 1900)

Durand-Ruel, New York (acquired from the above in February 1901 until 1947)

Baron Louis de Chollet, Fribourg (Switzerland)

Sam Salz, New York (acquired from the above in March 1964)

Acquired from the above in December 1966

Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel, C. Pissarro, 1901, no. 34

Portland, Oregon, 1905

Toledo Museum, 1905-06

Chicago, Chicago, Anderson Art Co., 1906

Columbia, University of Missouri, 1911

New York, Galerie Durand-Ruel, C. Pissarro, 1912, no. 16

Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro and Lionello Venturi, Camille Pissarro, Son Art – Son Oeuvre, vol. I, San Francisco, 1989, no. 1152, catalogued p. 241; vol. II, no. 1152, illustrated pl. 228

Pissarro began painting scenes of Éragny-sur-Epte when he bought a house there in 1884.  Only two hours from Paris on the road to Dieppe, the small village of Éragny offered the artist an idyllic retreat from the big city, complete with green pastures, flowering gardens, and meadows with apple trees.  The charm of this lush countryside inspired over two-hundred paintings in the last decades of Pissarro’s life, some of which were exhibited to great acclaim at the artist’s solo exhibition at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1901.  The present work, painted in 1900 and included in that famous exhibition, is a compilation of the various motifs in Éragny that captivated Pissarro for nearly 20 years.

Soleil couchant, automne Éragny depicts a group of apple harvesters at work in the early evening as the sun sets over the orchard.  Scenes of rural labor had appeared frequently in Pissarro’s pictures of the 1880s, when he completed a series of paintings and pastels devoted to the daily activities of local peasants in the countryside or at the market in Pontoise.  The artist’s return to this theme at the turn of the century in Éragny, where agricultural settings were yet unspoiled by the encroaching industrialization of Paris, holds a particular significance.  Painted from a distance, the peasants here are timeless emblems of rural life, mere elements of the greater landscape at large. These are not individuals struggling with the land, but figures completely in harmony with nature.  In his monograph on the artist, Joachim Pissarro has written, “Unlike Pontoise, whose tensions were those of a suburban town, semirural and semiurban, in Éragny, no signs of industry could be observed for miles.  Varied expanses of pasture and cultivated land complete the visual field.  However, Éragny’s early space is not banal.  For twenty years Pissarro concentrated on this very confined area, on the visual material offered by the stretch of meadows lying in front of him, informed by poplars, gates, the river, and produced over two hundred paintings of these motifs.  His representations of these fields and gardens constitute the most spectacularly intense pictorial effort to ‘cover’ a particular given space in his career” (Joachim Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, New York, 1992, p. 225).