Camille Pissarro

Arthur Tooth & Sons, London
Mr & Mrs Jean-Claude Landau, USA (acquired by 1994)
Acquired by the present owner in 2006

Jerusalem, The Israel Museum & New York, The Jewish Museum, Camille Pissarro - Impressionist Innovator, 1995, no. 69, illustrated in the catalogue

Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro & Lionello Venturi, Camille Pissarro: son art, son œuvre, Paris, 1939, vol. I, no. 1453, catalogued p. 282; vol. II, no. 1453, illustrated pl. 282
Joachim Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, New York, 1993, illustrated in colour p. 205

The linen is unlined. Apart from some very fine stable craquelure, this work is in good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate, although more subtle in the original.
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Throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, one of Pissarro's most frequently depicted motifs was the marketplace, the centre of social interaction in rural France. The subject was a life-long favourite of Pissarro, who equated the identity of the nation with that of its rural working class. The vast majority of these compositions, featuring images of shoppers and vendors mingling and haggling at the markets of Gisors and Pontoise, were executed in gouache and tempera that was applied with frenetic cross-hatching to evoke the frenzy of the market. In the present work, Pissarro has depicted a small cluster of bartering peasants, in the immediate foreground and in close proximity to the viewer.

Joachim Pissarro has written extensively about the artist's depictions of the market, suggesting that these compositions offer a glimpse into his creative process: 'These paintings powerfully evoke the bustling dynamic of his imagination and of his compositional methods... For them he essentially resorted to a considerable variety of techniques, among which oil painting was not predominant. They suggest the continuum of the ebbing fluxes of the crowds gathering weekly, actively engaged in intense exchanges: buying, selling, bartering, testing, conversing, swearing, communicating, shouting, daydreaming, laughing, etc... the activity in these scenes hints at the bustling, plastic and compositional activity involved in depicting them' (J. Pissarro, op. cit., pp. 198-199).