This work will be included in the forthcoming Camille Pissarro Digital Catalogue Raisonné, being prepared under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc.


Ludovic Piette was born in 1829 in a family of notables in the Mayenne in North Western Fance. He developed a passion for painting very early on and, in 1850, he started paying frequent visits to Isidore Pils's workshop, then Thomas Couture's, where he met Edouard Manet. He also took classes at the Académie Suisse, alongside Paul Cezanne, Claude Monet and Camille Pissaro. It was probably there that he met the latter, who was to become one of his closest friends. The two painters spent a lot of time together at Pissaro's home in Pontoise outside Paris, as well as in Piette's country estate of Montfoucault. In 1863, they began a long correspondence that lasted until 1877, the year before Piette's. This correspondence was to become a precious testimony of the early formative years of the Impressionist movement.

In this magnificent pastel, Pissarro portrays his friend with his large hat and bohemian scarf, clearly the trappings of an artist and surely the way Piette probably often dressed when they took walks in the countryside in search of subjects to paint en plein-air. This very accomplished portrait is both a moving testimony to an authentic artistic complicity as well as, with it lively and audacious use of pastel, a remarkable example of a genuinely impressionist portrait from the golden age of the movement.