Camille Pissarro

Edmond Decap, Rouen (sold: Coll. de Monsieur X, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, April 15, 1901, lot 19)

Auguste Savard

Durand-Ruel, Paris (acquired from the above on March 17, 1920)

Alvan T. Fuller, Boston (acquired from the above on July 8, 1925)

Mary H. Henderson, Boston (by descent from the above and sold: Christie's, New York, May 12, 1992, lot 104)

Private Collection, New York

Acquired from the above on February 13, 1996

London, The Leicester Galleries, Memorial Exhibition of the Works of Camille Pissarro, 1920, no. 74

Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, A Memorial Exhibition of the Collection of the Honorable Alvan T. Fuller, 1959, no. 35

Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 1962 (on loan)

Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 1972 (on loan)

Frank Rutter, Arts Gazette, London, May 22, 1920, p. 76

"Men, Women and Affairs. The Memorial Exhibition of the Works of Camille Pissarro," The Jewish Guardian, London, May 28, 1920, p. 13

John Middleton Murry, "Art.  The Sincerity of Camille Pissarro," The Nation, London, June 12, 1920, p. 6

Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro and Lionello Venturi, Camille Pissarro, son art -- son oeuvre, vol. I, Paris, 1939, no. 882, catalogued p. 203; vol. II, no. 882, illustrated pl. 179 (titled Moulin à Knokke, Belgique)

Charles Kunstler, Camille Pissarro, Milan, 1974, illustrated p. 79

John Rewald, C. Pissarro, Paris, 1974, illustrated p. 60

Janine Bailly-Herzberg, Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, vol. III, Paris, 1980, no. 1065, p. 502

Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro, catalogue critique des peintures, vol. III, Paris, 2005, no. 1044, illustrated p. 669

Although Pissarro was at Eragny on June 24, 1894 when the President of the Republic, Sadi Carnot was murdered, his anarchist sympathies caused his name to be listed as one of the hundreds of suspects.  He left for Belgium with Julie and their son Félix the next day.  He spent the next four months in Belgium, visiting Brussels, Bruges, and Knokke-sur-mer with Théo van Rysselberghe.  The distinctive topography of the seaside resort town, with its windmills and churches seen from across the dunes, was of considerable appeal to Pissarro.  Le Kalfmolen à Knokke illustrates the artist’s delight with this landscape.  His color scheme is effective in establishing a harmonious relationship between nature and man-made buildings.  He uses the same purple and pink pastel tones in the ground, the house and the sky.  This creates a unified composition and encourages the viewer’s eye to linger.  The bright earthy tones of the roofs enliven the composition, and one can sense Pissarro’s longing for the sun and warmer climate of Eragny.

One of the most prominent avant-garde painters of his generation, Pissarro had achieved enormous success as both an Impressionist and a Neo-Impressionist painter.  Adjusting certain elements from his classic Impressionist period of the 1870s and combining them with characteristics of his Neo-Impressionist style of the 1880s, Pissarro began developing a fresh approach to painting in the early 1890s.  This new-found stability is reflected in the present work in the sense of unity and harmony between nature and the man-made.  Gauguin wrote in 1902: “If the whole of Pissarro’s art is examined, we find there, in spite of fluctuations, not only an unfailing surfeit of artistic will, but also an essentially intuitive, thoroughbred art. However distant the haystack might be, over there on the slope, Pissarro will always rouse himself, walk round it, examine it. (…)  In a shop window, I saw a charming fan of his— a humble, half-open gate separates two very green (Pissarro Green) meadows, letting through a flock of geese who march forward with a watchful eye, saying worriedly to one another: ‘Are we going to Seurat’s or to Millet’s?’ In the end, they all go to Pissarro’s” (quoted in Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snoellaerts, op. cit., pp. 247-248).