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CAMILLE PISSARRO (1830-1903) Paysage avec promeneurs se reposant sous les arbres signed and date...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:1,500,000.00 - 2,000,000.00 USD
CAMILLE PISSARRO (1830-1903) Paysage avec promeneurs se reposant sous les arbres signed and date...

CAMILLE PISSARRO

(1830-1903)

Paysage avec promeneurs se reposant sous les arbres

signed and dated “C. Pissarro 1872” (lower right)

oil on canvas

74 x 92.5 cm (29 1⁄4 x 36 3⁄8 in.)

painted in 1872

Estimate: £1,000,000–1,500,000

$1,500,000–2,200,000




Provenance

Henri Canonne, Paris

M. Knoedler & Co., New York

Mrs. F. William Carr, Palm Beach, 1950

Acquavella Galleries, New York, 1972

Private Collection, New York

Marco Grassi, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1988




Exhibited

San Antonio, Texas, Witte Memorial Museum, Loan Exhibition of Paintings XVI to XIX Century, 1949, no. 8

Lugano, Villa Favorita, Impressionismo e Postimpressionismo, April 1-July 8, 1990, p. 50, no. 18 (illustrated in colour, p. 51)




Literature

Arsène Alexandre, “La Collection Cannone,” in La Renaissance, April 1930, Paris, p. 96
(illustrated; as Paysage aux environs d’Eragny)

Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro and Lionello Venturi, Camille Pissarro, son Art – son Oeuvre, Paris, 1939, vol. I, p. 102, no. 167; vol. II, pl. 33 (illustrated)

Bernard Dunstan, Painting Methods of the Impressionists, New York, 1976, p. 72 (illustrated)

Joachim Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, New York, 1993, pp. 70-71, and 111 (illustrated, p. 70)


<p>When the Franco-Prussian War ended in the summer of 1871, Camille Pissarro returned to his home in Louveciennes, a suburb of Paris on the banks of the Seine. Ransacked by the Prussian army during the artist’s exile in London, Pissarro’s studio now contained few examples of his earlier work. Forced to begin with a clean slate, Pissarro embarked on an incredibly fertile phase of his career. During this second sojourn to Louveciennes, Pissarro produced his first truly Impressionist paintings, including the present work.
Despite its unusual composition, this work demonstrates a heightened sensitivity to the play of light and shadow – a hallmark of Pissarro’s best work in Louveciennes. Indeed, few other paintings from this period combine a range of atmospheric effects from such a limited palette. In reference to such passages in this painting, Joachim Pissarro has explained that, “One of the persistent beliefs about Impressionism is that the artistic, innovative movement was all about painting light or atmospheric effects. It would be more exact to say that the Impressionists painted light insofar as it produced its inevitable counter-effect – shadow. Furthermore, perhaps one of the inventions of the Impressionists was that light was made visible only through its absence or its opposite – shadow. The exquisite silvery patches of light spiking on the ground or the freckling light screened through foliage was an archetype of the Impressionist vision. Paysage avec promeneurs se reposant sous les arbres and La Maison dans le bois exist only through the exact diagram of their negative: the shadows define and distribute light, and vice versa, light projects and constructs the shadows. These constant flows of light changes, along with atmospheric changes, are measurable and perceptible only through the unchanging contextual reality – the walls, streets, trees, and sidewalks that look the same from one day to the next, and guide our steps and gazes. To the extent that the Louveciennes works depict the polymorphic oppositions between those permanent structures and the transient variations affecting those structures, they are preeminently Impressionistic” (Joachim Pissarro, op. cit., pp. 70-71).