Camille Pissarro

M. May, Paris
Sale: Drouot-Richelieu, Paris, December 14, 2001, lot 7
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Gustave Goetschy, "Exposition des artistes indépendants," Le Voltaire, Paris, April 5, 1882, discussed pp. 1-2
Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro and Lionello Venturi, Camille Pissarro, Son Art – Son Oeuvre, vol. I, Paris, 1939, no. 1336, catalogued p. 266; vol. II, illustrated pl. 262
Charles S. Moffett, The New Painting, Impressionism 1874-1886 (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, 1986, listed p. 355

The theme of the rural worker is one of the most popular in Pissarro's oeuvre.  These compositions were largely inspired by the work of the great French landscape painters of the early 19th century, like Corot and Millet, and demonstrated the same reverence for the cultivation of the land and rural life.  But Pissarro, working in the 1880s, invests his composition with the innovative Impressionist techniques for rendering light and color, and concentrates on the individuality of the peasant more intensely than did his predecessors.  In this work he has depicted a character known as "le Père Melon," a nickname that derived from the fellow's melon-shaped hat.  This figure appeared frequently in Pissarro's compositions from 1880, and here he is portrayed chopping wood in the open air.

Le Père Melon fendant du bois was included in the sixth of the eight original group exhibitions that the Impressionists held in Paris between 1874 and 1886.  Pissarro contributed 28 works to this show, and this one was listed as number 78 in the exhibition catalogue.  In his review of the exhibition, the critic Gustave Goetschy, who recognized the influence of Millet in the present work, praised Pissarro's technique for rendering the fresh atmosphere of the landscape: "M. Pissarro is a painter of merit, who seeks, as does his Impressionist colleague M. Monet, to render the impression of things by the juxtapositions and infinite vibrations of tones. It is an analyst of color who sees nature through a prism.  His procedure is intensely interesting and convincing...." (Gustave Goetschy, "Exposition des artistes indépendants," Le Voltaire, Paris, April 5, 1882, translated from the French).