CAMILLE PISSARRO Saint Thomas 1830 - 1903 Paris

Paysanne assise et chèvres

Signed and dated lower left: C. Pissarro. 84. Oil on canvas: 23 ½ x 29 in / 59.8 x 73.6 cm Frame size: 32 ¼ x 37 ¾ in / 81.9 x 95.9 cm

Provenance: Acquired from the artist on 10th August 1885 by Durand- Ruel, Paris; from whom acquired on 5th April 1888 by Catholina Lambert, Paterson, New Jersey; from whom acquired on 14th April 1899 by Durand-Ruel, New York (until at least 1936) Sam Salz, Inc., New York; from whom acquired in November 1959 by Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon

Exhibited: Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel, 1904 New York, Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paintings - Camille Pissarro, 1936, no.9 Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Camille Pissarro: The Unexplored Impressionist, 1981 Albany, Institute of History of Art, Paintings by the French Master Impressionists, no.21

Literature: Cortissoz, New York Herald Tribune, 8th March 1936, p.10 The Art News, New York, 14th March 1936, p.8 Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro and Lionello Venturi, Camille Pissarro, son art – son oeuvre, Paris 1939, vol. I, p.173, no.650; vol. II, pl.134 Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro, Catalogue critique des peintures, vol. III, Paris 2005, p.506, no.764, illus. in colour

In April 1884 Camille Pissarro moved with his family to Eragny-sur-Epte, a village of about 450 people seventy-two kilometres north-west of Paris. He first rented, then bought his spacious house in 1892, living there for the rest of his life. Although he went to Paris to see his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel and travelled to Rouen, Dieppe and London in search of new painting motifs, Eragny became Pissarro’s Giverny, a reservoir of calm, of family life and of the renewing power of nature. He executed over 350 oils, gouaches and pastels of the area, many in the comparatively small compass of his own meadows, the adjacent smallholdings and the view towards Bazincourt on the hill.

Agricultural workers are a harmonious presence in these landscapes. Pissarro’s wife Julie, a popular figure in the village, was of peasant stock herself and joined in the communal tasks such as harvesting which bind rural communities together. (Pissarro, the middle-class, Anarchist intellectual, was regarded with more suspicion).

Favourite themes are women pushing wheelbarrows, haymaking or tending cattle. Female countryfolk appear more often in Pissarro’s paintings than men, probably because women executed tasks nearer to the village and he could also make use of female models from his own household. Paysanne assise et chèvres was made in the first year of Pissarro’s long sojourn in Eragny. A young peasant woman in a blue apron and straw hat tends a couple of goats which are almost hidden in the long, early summer grass. The composition is radical: Pissarro fills the canvas with vegetation, places the cropped trunk of a young fruit tree in the top left of the composition, and views the peasant girl from above, enhancing the sense of reverie and calm self-sufficiency which surrounds her. The cropping and powerful use of ‘empty’ space hark back to the Impressionists’ discovery of Japanese prints, but ultimately this is a painting about the effects of light on humans and nature, painted with the entwined filaments of colour characteristic of Pissarro in this period. The girl is enveloped in her environment, cushioned against a meadow of hopeful, springing green. The same shimmering surface is evident in La faneuse, 1884 (JAPS Collection, Mexico)1, in which the peasant girl wears the same costume.

Pissarro did not idealize his peasants or make pictorial narratives out of their lives. In 1886, the critic Alfred Paulet commented: ‘all his studies of country life are magnificent documents that leave a comforting impression…This poet sees nature as robust….He makes us see the robust peasant, strong in his work, in the middle of the day in full sunlight. And he does this as a poet, by instinct, without rhetorical effort’.

Note on provenance

This painting was sold in 1888 by Paul Durand-Ruel, lynchpin dealer for the Impressionists, to the English-born textile magnate Catholina Lambert (1834-1923). To house his vast art collection, Lambert built a house called Bella Vista or Lambert Castle on his estate in Paterson, New Jersey. Its gothic style reminded him of the Yorkshire castles he had glimpsed on his way to work in the cotton mills of his youth.

In 1959 Paysanne assise et chèvres was bought by Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon, who both inherited and amassed one of the finest collections of Impressionist and other paintings in America. Their philanthropic activities were legion. Paul Mellon (1907-1999) financed the West and East Wings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC and he and his wife donated over 1,000 major paintings to that institution, as well as building the Yale Center for British Art to house Paul’s collection of British works. Paul Durand-Ruel’s faith and tenacity had enabled the Impressionists to survive in their earliest years; collectors like the Mellons ensured that their brilliance was appreciated not just by an American, but by a worldwide audience.

1 Pissarro and Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, op. cit., vol. III, p.507, no.766, illus. in colour. 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 St Thomas 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 principal 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 Impressionist idiom. Pissarro died in Paris in 1903.