Camille Pissarro

Galeries Georges Petit, Paris
M. Knoedler & Co., New York (acquired from the above in 1925)
Etienne Bignou, Paris (acquired from the above in 1925)
L.L. Marcel, Kansas City
Louis Marcel Davis, Aspen (by descent from the above)
Galerie Taménaga, Tokyo (acquired before 1986 and sold: Sotheby's, New York, November 11, 1988, lot 5)
Acquired at the above sale

London, The Lefevre Gallery (Alex. Reid & Lefevre, Ltd.), The Impressionist School and Some Great French Painters of the XIXth Century, 1923, no. 14
Kansas City, Nelson Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Homage to Effie Seachrest, 1966, no. 1
Paris, Galerie Taménaga, De Goya à Chagall, 1986, n.n.

Ludovic Rodo Pissarro & Lionello Venturi, Camille Pissarro, Son art, son oeuvre, vol. I, Paris, 1939, no. 154, catalogued p. 101; vol. II, Paris, 1939, no. 154, illustrated pl. 31
Joachim Pissarro & Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro, Catalogue critique des peintures, vol. II, Paris, 2005, no. 242, illustrated in color p. 198

This painting is unlined. The tacking edges have been reinforced, and the stretcher is not original. The paint layer is clean and very lightly varnished if at all. No retouches are identifiable. Although the tacking edges have been reinforced, this picture is essentially in perfect condition. The above condition report has been prepared by Simon Parkes, an independent conservator who is not an employee of Sotheby's.
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.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Painted circa 1872, Paysage avec une vachère depicts the surroundings of Pontoise, the small French town in which Pissarro lived from 1866 until 1883. In deciding to move to Pontoise, the artist was partly guided by a desire to separate himself from the influence of his predecessors, the established French landscape painters, and to depict an environment previously scarcely recorded by other masters. The variety of motifs offered by the town and its environment provided Pissarro with a range of subjects to paint, from crowded semi-urban genre scenes, views of roads and factories, to isolated landscapes devoid of human presence. In this work, he depicts a peasant woman herding a cow in the center of the composition; although they are relatively small in scale, they are placed at the focal point of the composition, where the lines defining its main elements meet. In representing figures in nature, Pissarro’s interest lay not so much in documenting a specific scene, but in depicting a vision of color and form that included the harmonious presence of peasants and rural life.

Writing about Pissarro’s early 1870s views of Pontoise, which he called "the classic Pontoise period," Richard Brettell observed: "It is probable that, when the history of Impressionism is rewritten in another hundred years, Pissarro’s paintings of 1872 and 1873 will be considered his masterpieces, as great, in their way, as Corot’s work from his first trips to Italy or as Monet’s landscapes from the late 1860s. Pissarro’s style in the classic Pontoise period derived from the combined example of Monet and Turner, grafted to his by then familiar version of Corot’s style [...] Pissarro’s landscapes in the classic Pontoise period are distant, balanced worlds in which man and his architecture dominate nature, whose rhythms are controllable and essentially benign. Pissarro’s view of agriculture in this period continues to veer away from the predominantly 'genre' character of agricultural imagery in French painting of the previous generation. The laboring figures who inhabit the foreground plane of so many landscapes of the first Pontoise period become tinier and more recessive in the classic Pontoise period. The earthy, consciously crude presence of the peasant which is so important a component of mid-century peasant imagery gives way to the landscape, with its sweeping horizons and cloud-dotted skies" (Richard Brettell, Pissarro and Pontoise, New Haven & London, 1990, pp. 151-53).