Camille Pissarro

In the winter of 1898, Pissarro decided to rent an apartment in Paris rather than to take hotel rooms, as he had done during his previous visits to the capital. In a letter to his son Lucien dated 4^th December 1898, Pissarro wrote: 'We have engaged an apartment at 204 rue de Rivoli, facing the Tuileries, with a superb view of the Garden, the Louvre to the left, in the background the houses on the quais behind the trees, to the right the Dôme des Invalides, the steeples of Ste. Clothilde behind the solid mass of chestnut trees. It is very beautiful. I shall paint a fine series' (C. Pissarro, quoted in Pissarro (exhibition catalogue), Hayward Gallery, London, 1980, p. 146). Due to adverse weather in the winter months of 1898-99 the artist was making a slow progress, but in a letter of 12^th April 1899 he reported to have done much work on his Tuileries series. On 23^rd May he wrote: 'I sent Durand-Ruel eleven of my Tuileries canvases, I am keeping three of them' (ibid., p. 146). Among the eleven works mentioned in the letter is the present painting Le Carrousel, matin d’automne. During the first half of 1900 Pissarro executed a second series of the Jardin des Tuileries, painted from the same viewpoint (L. R. Pissarro and L. Venturi, op. cit., nos. 1123-36).

Being settled in an apartment, rather than frequently moving between short-term accommodations, allowed Pissarro to spend more time working on a particular series of paintings, and to meditate and experiment with the subject matter. This resulted in a great variation within the series, as the artist was able to observe and depict his subject in different weather conditions, and in different seasons and times of the day. Moving from one window to the next, the artist captured the urban landscape in front of him from three slightly different vantage points, thus creating three distinctive views within the Tuileries series: a frontal viewpoint showing the Bassins des Tuileries (figs. 1 & 2), a view of the Louvre’s Pavillon de Flore and the southern wing, Aile Denon, in the background (fig. 2) and, moving eastwards, a view of the Pavillon de Marsan to the left, with Jardin du Carrousel in the centre and the Aile Denon in the background, as in the present work.

The compositional basis for this work is found in the vertical, horizontal and circular patterns of the Jardin des Tuileries, as originally designed by André Le Nôtre in the second half of the seventeenth century. Writing about this series, Joachim Pissarro observed that the Tuileries Gardens series 'offered a chance to study the interaction of the rectangular and the circular. A succession of rectangles are seen interlocked with each other: the anciens jardins réservés lead into the Jardin du Carrousel and to the Place du Carrousel and the Cour Napoléon through the Arc du Carrousel. These rectangles stretching along the Seine and confined between the Allée des Orangers and the Terrasse du Bord de l’Eau are offset by circular structures: the Grand Bassin rond or the other smaller bassins, as well as by strong cruciform or orthogonal structures, which confer on these views a solid, architectonic strength. These structures are themselves counter-balanced by foliage or entangled branches. The marvellously symmetrical layout of the Gardens was fragmented, disrupted and pluralised in Pissarro’s paintings of them' (J. Pissarro, in The Impressionist and the City (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., p. 104).

Having completed a series of the Boulevard Montmartre, with its wide spaces pulsating with horse-drawn carriages, pedestrians and other signs of the busy life of the metropolis, in the Tuileries series Pissarro took pleasure in painting the calmer, greener parts of Paris, in depicting nature within the city. This series, representing bastions of art and tradition such as the Louvre, stand in contrast to Pissarro’s paintings of the new areas of Paris, recently transformed and modernised by the popular boulevards designed by Baron Hausmann. The Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, visible in the middle distance of the present work, was built in the first decade of the nineteenth century, to commemorate the Napoleonic victories of 1805. Based on the Arch of Septimius Severus in Rome, it stands as a romantic symbol of the French empire and its grandeur. With its fascinating architecture and history, the Jardin des Tuileries captured the imagination of other Impressionist artists, including Claude Monet who, in 1876, depicted a view from the apartment only a few doors away from that occupied by Pissarro, at 198 rue de Rivoli (fig. 4).

Fig. 1, Camille Pissarro, Le Jardin des Tuileries, temps de pluie, 1899, oil on canvas, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Fig. 2, Camille Pissarro, Le Jardin des Tuileries, après-midi d’hiver, 1899, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Fig. 3, Camille Pissarro, Jardin des Tuileries, 1900, oil on canvas, Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow
Fig. 4, Claude Monet, Les Tuileries, 1876, oil on canvas, Musée Marmottan, Paris