Camille Pissarro

Sale: Galeries Georges Petit, Paris, March 19, 1894, lot 33
Theodore Duret, Paris (acquired at the above sale)
Bisson, Paris
Galerie Paul Rosenberg (acquired circa 1937)
Acquired by the family of the present owner in 1945
Thence by descent

London, Galerie Rosenberg & Helft, Ltd., Exhibition of Works from Ingres to van Gogh, 1937, no. 22
Bern, Kunstmuseum, Camille Pissarro, 1957, no. 56

Ludovic-Rodo & Lionello Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, son art, son oeuvre, vol. I, Paris, 1939, illustrated p. 154
Merete Bodelsen, "Early Impressionist Sales 1874-94 in the Light of Some Unpublished Procès-Verbaux," in The Burlington Magazine, June 1968, pp. 344-345
Andrea P.A. Belloli et al., A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1984,
p. 200, note 1
Christopher Lloyd, ed., Studies on Camille Pissarro, London, 1987,
no. 28, p. 73
Joachim Pissarro & Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro : Catalogue critique des peintures, vol. II, Paris, 2005, no.633, illustrated p. 424

Canvas is not lined; canvas is slightly buckling at upper right corner. Some thin cracks are visible in the sky at upper right. Overall the surface is rich, textured, and lively. Under UV light: some original pigments and a few scattered areas of pooling varnish fluoresce, but no inpainting is apparent. Overall the work is in excellent condition.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Three peasants, a couple who walk towards a woman pushing a plow,  meet on the Rue des Roches in the village of Le Valhermeil in the commune of Auvers-sur-Oise on a summer's day.  In the present work Pissarro depicts the thatched-roofed cottages (chaumières) that were to be found in the hamlets around Pontoise. These cottages provide the structural organization of the painting, leading our eye down the road, their roofs giving way to the hills and trees beyond.

Pissarro exhibited a painting of the same town at the 6^th Impressionist Exhibition in 1881. In his review of the artist's contributions to the show the critic J.-K. Huysmans praised Pissarro's landscapes, stating: "In short, M. Pissarro can now be classed among the remarkable and daring painters we have. If he can preserve this eye -- so perceptive, so agile, so fine -- we will certainly have in him the most original landscapist of our time." Of particular note to those who saw this work and the other landscapes Pissarro chose to exhibit was his stippled brushwork, made up of tiny vibrant strokes that together formed a dense and shimmering surface. This marked a break from the smoother application of paint and more subdued tones Pissarro had presented in the 5^th Impressionist Exhibition the previous year. Huysmans seems to have immediately understood the artist's intention with this new technique: "From close up [the painting] is like brickwork, a strange wrinkled [patchwork], a stew of colors of all kinds covering the canvas with lilac, Naples yellow, madder-red, and green; at a distance, it is the air that moves, it is the sky that is boundless, it is nature that palpitates..." (Joris-Karl Huysmans, "L'exposition des indépendants en 1881," cited in Charles Moffett, The New Painting: Impressionism 1874-1886, Washington, D.C., 1986, p. 347).

For Pissarro, the rural countryside around Pontoise, where he lived from 1866 to 1868 and again from 1872-1882, represented the antithesis to modern urban life. Indeed, in paintings such as this and others from this period (see figs. 1 & 2), Pissarro celebrates, as Robert Herbert suggested, "ideals of health, honest labor and dignity which he set against the pollution and degraded labor of the city" (Robert Herbert, "City vs. Country: The Rural Image in French Painting from Millet to Gauguin," Artforum 2, 1970, pp. 44-55).

Fig. 1 Camille Pissarro, Chaumières au Valhermeil, Auvers-sur-Oise, 1880, Private Collection