CAMILLE PISSARRO
Charlotte Amalie, Saint Thomas 1830 - 1903 Paris
Ref: CL 3797
Chaumières à Auvers-sur-oise
Stamped with initials lower right: C.P.
Oil on canvas: 25 5/8 x 31 7/8 in / 65.1 x 81 cm
Frame size: 37 5/8 x 44 in / 95.5 x 112 cm
Painted circa 1873
Provenance:
Julie Pissarro, the artist’s wife, inherited from the artist, 1904;
given to their son Ludovic-Rodolphe Pissarro by deed of gift, 1921;
by descent
Exhibited:
Paris, Galerie Manzi-Joyant, Exposition retrospective d’oeuvres de Camille Pissarro, 26th January-14th February 1914, no.38
Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel, Tableaux par Camille Pissarro, 27th February-10th March 1928, no.17
Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie, Centenaire de la naissance de Camille Pissarro, February-March 1930, no.123
Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, on loan
Literature:
Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro and Lionello Venturi, Camille Pissarro - Son Art, Son Oeuvre, Paris 1939, vol. I, p.111, no.228; vol. II, pl.45, illus.
Richard R Brettell, Pissarro and Pontoise: the Painter in a Landscape, New Haven and London 1990, pp.44, 158
Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro: Critical Catalogue of Paintings, vol II, 2005, p.244, no.310, illus.
Chaumières à Auvers-sur-Oise is an important painting by Camille Pissarro executed at a crucial moment of the history of Impressionism. It depicts the famous village that would go on to be captured by so many other artists, most notably by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne.
Last year we celebrated the 150th anniversary of the birth of Impressionism. The first official exhibition of the group, before they were labelled with their eponymous term, took place in April 1874 at the studios of the photographer Nadar in Paris. It was a true eye-opener for the wider public, who had previously been unaware of this radical new approach to painting. From this the Impressionist movement was born and from the 1870s onwards, its prestige would slowly begin to rise until it achieved the global success that we know today. To celebrate this landmark, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC joined forces last year to recreate this historical and emblematic exhibition, bringing together paintings by different members of the group executed in their earliest years, between 1870 and 1873.
Chaumières à Auvers-sur-Oise was one such painting and is a fine example of the personality and expression that Pissarro would bring to the Impressionist movement. Preferring to work en plein air, Pissarro believed that painting outdoors allowed him to capture all the nuances of ephemeral light and its effects on the landscape. As clouds move with the wind, the tonalities of the shades evolve. Much like the approach of Claude Monet, Pissarro is carefully recording these moments and subtleties of light, in a constant search for the right tones.
The painting depicts la rue Rémy in what was at the time a very rural village, with thatched cottages along the road. Auvers-sur-Oise was and still is a very beautiful and inspiring site and now exists on the outskirts of Paris, where most of these houses are now covered with tiles or slates. When the painting was executed, this peaceful settlement along the river Oise had started to attract an older generation of painters such as Corot and Daubigny, who owned houses in the village. Camille Pissarro later settled in the little town of Pontoise, just three kilometres away from Auvers. He was quickly joined there by Cézanne who himself spent nearly ten years depicting the region, often side by side with his friend Pissarro. Years later a third wave of painters brought Vincent van Gogh to the village, and it is from there that the artist would realise some of his most emblematic works of his final period.
Another notable resident of Auvers was the famous Docteur Gachet. In addition to his medical vocation, Gachet was passionate about art and was an amateur painter and engraver. On the left side of the composition, one can see the top of a white chimney, belonging to Gachet’s neighbouring house. Pissarro knew Gachet and was responsible for making the important introduction between the doctor and the van Gogh brothers, who became close friends and with whom Vincent would go on to stay with for some time in Auvers. During this period Gachet often served as van Gogh’s model and his image is immortalised in several major portraits by the artist.
Pissarro’s depiction of this quiet street in his local town may at first glance seem unassuming. In fact it epitomises, at a crucial moment and in a pivotal location, what Impressionism brought to the story of art in the late nineteenth century, and beyond.
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Saint Thomas 1830 - 1903 Paris
Camille Pissarro was perhaps the greatest propagandist and the most constant member of the Impressionists and the only one to participate in all eight of their exhibitions. Born in 1830 in the Danish colony of Saint Thomas[1] in the West Indies, of Sephardic Jewish parentage, he went to school in Paris and then worked in his father’s business for five years. Ill-suited to being a merchant, Pissarro decided to become a painter, studying at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the informal Académie Suisse. He was considerably influenced and encouraged by Corot and to a lesser extent by Courbet.
During the 1860s Pissarro exhibited at the official Salons and in 1863 at the Salon des Refusés. He increasingly associated himself with the Impressionists, especially Monet and Renoir, and with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 fled to London, where Durand-Ruel became his principal patron and dealer.
After the war, Pissarro returned to France and settled at Pontoise, spending much time with Cézanne, whom he directed towards Impressionism. In 1884 he moved to Eragny. During the 1890s the meadows at Eragny-sur-Epte, looking across to the village of Bazincourt, became one of Pissarro’s chief subjects, painted at different times of the day and year.
In 1885 Pissarro came into contact with Seurat and Signac and for a brief period experimented with Neo-Impressionism. The rigidity of this technique, however, proved too restrictive and he returned to the freedom and spontaneity of Impressionism. From 1893 Pissarro embarked upon a series of Parisian themes, such as the Gare St Lazare and the Grands Boulevards. He continued to spend the summers at Eragny, where he painted the landscape in his most poetic Post-Impressionist idiom. Pissarro died in Paris in 1903.
[1] Today part of the US Virgin Islands.
