Camille Pissarro

Julie Pissarro, France (the artist's wife)
Paul-Émile Pissarro, France (a gift from the above in 1921 and until at least 1930)
Private Collection, Paris
Sale: Tajan, Paris, June 24, 1999, lot 13
Acquired in 2007

Paris, Galerie Manzi-Joyant, Exposition rétrospetive d'oeuvres de Camille Pissarro, 1914, no. 58
Paris, Galerie Nunès & Fiquet, Exposition de la collection de Madame Veuve C. Pissarro, 1921, no. 37
Paris, Musée de l'Orangerie, Centenaire de naissance de Camille Pissarro, 1930, no. 101
London, Stern Pissarro Gallery, Camille Pissarro: St Thomas to Paris, 2003, no. 44
Paris, Le Carrousel du Louvre, XXIIe Biennale des antiquaires, 2004, no. 1342

Janine Bailly-Herzberg, Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, vol. V, Paris, 1988, no. 1759, p. 127
Georges Lecomte, "Un Centenaire. Un fondateur de l'impressionnisme, Camille Pissarro," in Revue de l'art ancien et moderne, Paris, March 1930, illustrated p. 163
Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro & Lionello Venturi, Camille Pissarro. Son art—son œuvre, vol. I, Paris, 1939, no. 1150, illustrated pl. 228
Joachim Pissarro & Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro, Catalogue critique des peintures, vol. III, Paris, 2005, no. 1342, illustrated p. 825

This work is in very good condition. The canvas is not lined and is on its original stretcher. The surface is clean and richly-textured. There is a very slight buckling in lower right corner. Under UV light: there is a thin varnish but no inpainting is apparent.
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.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Painted in 1900, the present work is a wonderfully rich and atmospheric depiction of the fall harvest near Pissarro’s house in Éragny, a small village on the banks of the river Epte. Pissarro and his family moved to Éragny, situated some three kilometers from Gisors, in the spring of 1884. In July 1892 Pissarro purchased the house his family had been renting for the previous eight years with the financial help of Claude Monet, who lived in the neighboring Giverny. The house exists to this day, in a street named after the artist. Pissarro was delighted with the tranquility of his new environment, and with the endless source of inspiration it offered him. In a letter to his son Lucien dated March 1, 1884, the artist wrote: “Yes, we’ve made up our minds on Éragny-sur-Epte. The house is superb and inexpensive: a thousand francs, with garden and meadow. It’s two hours from Paris. I found the region much more beautiful than Compiègne […] Gisors is superb: we’d seen nothing!” (quoted in Joachim Pissarro & Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, op. cit., p. 499). This was to be the Pissarro family home until the death of his wife Julie in 1928, and remained his principal source of rural subject matter for the late landscapes. It was here that he set up his “School of Éragny” for his numerous children, who assisted their father on his painting jaunts in the surrounding countryside.

During these years Pissarro liked to alternate between urban and rural subjects. He often went to harbor cities like Rouen and Le Havre, to Paris where he met with friends as well as art dealers, and to London, where he was visiting his sons. Exhausted by frequent travels, the artist would return to the peace of Éragny, where he enjoyed painting the garden and the meadow in front of his house, as well as the neighboring villages of Gisors and Bazincourt and the villagers at work in the fields. Henceforth, Éragny became the focal point of Pissarro’s art, and as Joachim Pissarro has observed: “His representations of these fields and gardens constitute the most spectacularly intense pictorial effort to ‘cover’ a particular given space in his career” (Joachim Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, London, 1993, p. 225). Pissarro never tired of depicting this region, exploring the changing light effects in various seasons and weather conditions. In the present work, he depicted this beloved place on a sunny morning, with the shimmering effect of the early morning light on the trees and foliage.

The critical and commercial success of Pissarro’s first major retrospective which was held at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in January 1892, brought a new confidence and stability to his life. One of the most prominent avant-garde painters of his generation, Pissarro had achieved enormous success as both an Impressionist and a Neo-Impressionist painter. Adjusting certain elements from his classic Impressionist period of the 1870s, and combining them with characteristics of his Neo-Impressionist style of the 1880s, in the early 1890s Pissarro began developing a fresh approach to painting. That new found stability is reflected in the present work, as its sense of unity and harmony between nature and the man-made world is particularly strong, and it expresses the painter’s profound belief in the ideal of a society based on egalitarian principles.