Camille Pissarro

Julie Pissarro, Paris (inherited from the artist in 1904)
Jeanne Pissarro-Bonin, Paris (gifted by deed in 1921)
Henri Cottereau, Paris
Sale: Galerie Motte, Geneva, June 19, 1965, no. 49
O'Hana Gallery, London (acquired by 1966)
Private Collection, Canada (acquired from the above)
Galerie Werner, Bremen (acquired from the above in 1980)
Acquired from the above in 1980

London, O'Hana Gallery, Summer Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 1968, no. 27

Executed in 1902, the present work is a wonderful depiction of washerwomen in on orchard near Pissarro’s house in Eragny, a small village on the banks of the river Epte. Pissarro and his family moved to Eragny (fig. 1), situated some three kilometers from Gisors, in the spring of 1884. In July 1892 Pissarro purchased the house his family had been renting for the previous eight years with the financial help of Claude Monet, who lived in the neighbouring Giverny. The house exists to this day, in a street named after the artist. Pissarro was delighted with the tranquility of his new environment, and with the endless source of inspiration it offered him. In a letter to his son Lucien dated 1^st March 1884, the artist wrote: "Yes, we’ve made up our minds on Eragny-sur-Epte. The house is superb and inexpensive: a thousand francs, with garden and meadow. It’s two hours from Paris. I found the region much more beautiful than Compiègne […] Gisors is superb: we’d seen nothing!" (quoted in J. Pissarro & C. Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, op. cit., p. 499). This was to be Pissarro’s family home until the death of his wife Julie in 1928, and remained his principal source of rural subject matter for the late landscapes. It was here that he set up his ‘School of Eragny’ for his numerous children, who assisted their father on his painting jaunts in the surrounding countryside.

In his review for the 1892 exhibition published in Le Figaro, the writer Octave Mirbeau described the artist’s visual concerns: "The eye of the artist, like the mind of the thinker, discovers the larger aspects of things, their wholeness and unity. Even when he paints figures in scenes of rustic life, man is always seen in perspective in the vast terrestrial harmony, like a human plant. To describe  the drama of the earth and to  move our hearts, M. Pissarro does not need violent  gestures, complicated arabesques and sinister branches against livid skies […] An orchard, with its apple trees in rows, its brick houses in the background and some women under the trees, bending and gathering the apples which have fallen to the ground, and a whole life is evoked, a dream rises up, soars, and such a simple thing, so familiar to our eyes, transforms itself into an ideal vision, amplified and raised to a great decorative poetry" (quoted in Ralph E. Shikes & Paula Harper, Pissarro: His Life and Work, New York, 1980, pp. 261-262).

Fig. 1, A view of Eragny on the river Epte, close to Pissarro’s house