Camille Pissarro

Galerie Druet, Paris (1917)
Private Collection, Paris
Galerie Nathan, Zurich (acquired circa 1977)
Acquired from the above by the father of the present owner

Joachim Pissarro & Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro. Catalogue critique des peintures, Paris, 2005, vol. III, no. 1382, illustrated in colour p. 847

The canvas is unlined and the edges are strip-lined. There is no evidence of retouching under ultra-violet light. This work is in very good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate, although slightly brighter; the yellows are more pronounced in the original.
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Painted in 1901, the present work is a wonderfully rich and atmospheric depiction of the meadow near Pissarro's house in Eragny, a small village on the banks of the river Epte. Pissarro and his family moved to Eragny, situated some three kilometres from Gisors, in the spring of 1884. In July 1892 Pissarro, with the financial help of Claude Monet who lived in neighbouring Giverny, purchased the house his family had been renting for the previous eight years; the house exists to this day, in a street named after the artist. Pissarro was delighted with the tranquillity of his new environment, and with the endless source of inspiration it offered him. In this work, he painted the meadow in the late afternoon on a summer day, with the warm, golden light of the afternoon sun reflected on the field and the foliage.

 

During these years Pissarro liked to alternate between the urban and rural scenes. He often went to cities like Rouen and Paris. Exhausted by frequent travels, the artist would return to the peace of Eragny, where he took joy in painting the garden and the meadow in front of his house, as well as the neighbouring villages of Gisors and Bazincourt. Joachim Pissarro wrote: 'Unlike Pontoise, whose tensions were those of a suburban town, semirural and semiurban, in Eragny, no signs of industry could be observed for miles. Varied expanses of pasture and cultivated land complete the visual field. [...] 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 [...]. His representations of these fields and gardens constitute the most spectacularly intense pictorial effort to "cover" a particular given space in his career' (J. Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, New York, 1992, p. 225).