Camille Pissarro

Dr. George Viau, Paris (sold: Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris, March 4, 1907, lot 50)

E. Druet, Paris

Paul Rosenberg & Co., Paris

Albert Roothbert, New York (acquired from the above before 1939)

Topstone Fund, New York (sold: Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, October 15, 1969, lot 21)

B. Gerald Cantor, New York (acquired at the above sale)

Leona Cantor Palmer (by descent from the above)

Acquired from the above in 1981

Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel, L'Exposition de l'oeuvre de Camille Pissarro, 1904, no. 39

Des Moines, Art Center; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Art Museum; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Fort Worth Art Center Museum, Selections from the B. Gerald Cantor Collection, 1970-1972, no. 15

Tokyo, Isetan Museum of Art; Fukuoka, Municipal Museum of Art, Camille Pissarro, 1984

Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro and Lionello Venturi, Camille Pissarro, Son Art -- Son Oeuvre, vol. I, Paris, 1939, no. 373, catalogued p. 133; vol. II, no. 373, illustrated

Los Angeles County Museum of Art Member's Calendar, Los Angeles, August 1983, p. 6

Los Angeles County Museum of Art Report, July 1, 1981-June 20, Los Angeles, 1983, 1984, p. 25

Scott Schaefer and Peter Fusco, European Painting and Sculpture in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 1987, p. 77

This thoughtful picture of a peasant woman is one of the intimate portrayals of rural life that Pissarro completed in the 1870s and 1880s.  Usually the artist favored pastel for his depictions of the field hands and market scenes of Pointoise, but his use of oil here evidences that he must have taken his time rendering his sitter.  He identified her as La Mère Gaspard, a local peasant woman, whose careworn face and strong hands reveal a lifetime of field labor, household chores and the miscellaneous demands of life in rural France.  The layered patches of color that the artist used to create the shapes of her garment, hands and face foreshadow the compositions of Cézanne, who interacted with Pissarro frequently around the time he painted this picture.

Joachim Pissarro has written the following about the artist's depictions of peasants: "Pissarro's figures are simple ('apparently') and sincere.  They are not on show and no pretense of any sort animates their action or their pictorial representation.  They have nothing to say: they are withdrawn or absorbed by their reverie or their chores.  Even in groups, there seems to be a conspicuous lack of dialogue or narration -- the painter seems to be depicting moments of silence as well as the lack of communication among the artist's models.  It is all the more surprising that greater attention was not given to the daydreaming activity of many of Pissarro's figures, since dream is a notion to which Pissarro gave repeated voice: 'I believe that there will be another generation who will be more sincere, more studious, and less maligned, who will achieve the dream" (Joachim Pissarro, Pissarro, New York, 1992, pp. 161-63).