Camille Pissarro

Mary Cassatt, Paris (a gift from the artist)
Minnie Cassatt Hickman, New York (by descent from the above)
Thence by descent

This work is in very good condition. Executed on cream colored velum, not laid down. Affixed to a mat around the edges on the verso. There is some very thin craquelure in the thickest pigments of the sky at the center, in the blue pigments just to the left of lower center and to the back of the female figure in lower right. There are a few pindots of black oxidization around the center of left edge.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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The present work is an exceptional example of Pissarro’s much-loved fan paintings and depicts one of the artist’s most significant and enduring themes, the rural farming community at work. Inspired by the influx of Japanese objects and prints to Paris, Edgar Degas envisaged a room devoted to fan paintings for the 1879 Impressionist exhibition, and encouraged Pissarro and other artists to work in this format. Pissarro accepted the challenge, showing twelve fan works at the exhibition, and he clearly found this project stimulating, enjoying the fan shape as a compositional framing device, for he continued to explore the format regularly until the late 1890s. Meanwhile the fan also made its way as a subject into paintings by artists including Manet, Renoir and Mary Cassatt, the best known American Impressionist (see fig. 4). 

As well as being a charming and accomplished depiction of an iconic Pissarro theme, the present work is also exceptional for its provenance. It was acquired directly from the artist by one of “les trois grandes dames” of Impressionism, Cassatt, and it has remained in the artist’s family ever since. Cassatt's pride in the work is evident from the fact that it hung in her collection throughout her life (see fig 1) and in that she chose to incorporate it into her own artwork, shown hanging in a prominent place within one of her many images of her sister Lydia (see fig. 2). Both Degas and Pissarro were to be great mentors to Cassatt and this work is testament to their friendship and mutual admiration. Cassatt's importance to the advance of Impressionism with early American collectors cannot be underestimated: her introduction of these artists to collectors including Louisine Havemeyer led to the inclusion of many important works now in the collections of numerous American institutions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  

It is not just the fan’s shape that links the present work to Degas, but the depiction of the figures themselves. Richard R. Brettell has remarked how “many, perhaps even the majority, of Pissarro’s figure drawings represent standing subjects, many of whom perform some kind of activity associated with work” and how this development “has its origins not in the atelier, with its posed figures, but in Degas’ studies of laundresses, dancers and horseback riders as they exercised or worked” (Richard R. Brettell, Pissarro’s People (exhibition catalogue), Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2011, p. 148).

Like Degas’s depictions of bathers or dancers, Pissarro enjoyed depicting peasants at work for the profound possibilities he found in the intensive study of the figure in action. Degas cared little for the most obvious splendor of a pirouette, placing far greater importance and focus on the dancer stretching, yawning or adjusting her clothing. Similarly, Pissarro’s depictions of workers tended to be in absent-minded postures that avoided any sense of self-consciousness, the rural equivalent of the stretching and preening forms Degas found at the beginning or end of a ballet class. The communal harvest is thus an excuse to explore and celebrate the quirks of the body in motion in all its many guises, and indeed the varying poses of the large cast of characters in the present work lend the image a strong sense of rhythm and complexity, accentuated by the intermittent dabs of bright red paint describing the workers’ cotton caps, tanned arms and the roofs on the horizon. The natural poetic intimacy of this rural dance takes place in a typically bucolic Impressionist setting of sprawling fields lined with poplar trees under the fresh light of an expansive blue sky.

The simple pleasures of rural life stand at the fore of Pissarro’s images of the 1880s and 1890s. Pissarro’s workers are not overcome by the toils of endless work like those we encounter in similar scenes by Millet or van Gogh: “rather than peasants,” Brettell describes how Pissarro’s figures “are more accurately rural workers whose labour in the fields is balanced both by plentiful leisure time and by their participation in the small-scale political economy of French agricultural markets. We never see gleaners taking the dregs of the harvest after the master has housed the grain, nor do we see bodies broken down by work. Instead, they are strong and hardy rather than graceful and conventionally beautiful. Pissarro was perhaps the first great painter of rural life who actually revealed a kind of relaxed beauty in fieldwork, which he associated with women as much as with men” (ibid., p. 171).