Camille Pissarro

Arsène Alexandre, Paris (sale: Galeries Georges Petit, 18th-19th May 1903, lot 47)
Galeries Georges Petit, Paris
Trabor, Hambourg
Goldschmidt, Frankfurt (circa 1926)
The Matthiesen Gallery, London
Werner Feuz, Switzerland
Private Collection, Switzerland (acquired from the above in 1952)
Sale: Galerie Koller, Zurich, 2nd December, 2003 lot 3046
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Painted in 1890, this work relates closely to Pissarro's Paturage, coucher de soleil, Éragny of the same date (see: L. R. Pissarro and L. Venturi, Camille Pissarro, Son vie-son œuvre, no. 753). Vacheur dans un pré à Eragny, depicts a farmer returning home with his cattle at the end of the day through a field on the edge of the town of Eragny.  Pissarro settled in Eragny after leaving Pontoise in 1882 and was to remain there for the rest of his life, creating his largest and most significant body of work within the landscape genre.

Joachim Pissarro writes of Pissarro's production in Eragny: 'Unlike Pontoise, whose tensions were those of a suburban town, semi-rural and semi-urban, in Eragny no signs of industry could be observed for miles.  Varied expanses of pasture and cultivated land complete the visual field.  However, Eragny's earthly space is not banal.  For twenty years Pissarro concentrated on this very confined area, on the visual material offered by the stretch of meadows lying in front of him, informed by poplars, gates, the river, and produced over two hundred paintings of these motifs.  His representations of these fields and gardens constitute the most spectacularly intense pictorial effort to ‘cover’ a particular given space in his career' (J. Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, New York, 1993, p. 225).