Hippolyte-Camille Delpy

Painted in the year Delpy moved with his family to the Barbizon forest, this Salon-scale workt depicts an Autumn harvesting of grapes in the Nivernais, in the Loire river, home to the white wines of Pouilly-Fumé and Sancerre, either of which we may presume are being gathered here. Sancerre’s steep vineyards have a grandeur found nowhere else in the Loire. Pouilly and Sancerre conclude a soil crescent that runs from the Aube through Chablis, dominated by limestone which gives the white wines their minerality.

Delpy painted this richly-colored view of the Sancerre hills at dawn with a deep impasto, reminiscent of his contemporaries – the Impressionists. Harvesting began in the cool before the sun, unseen and only just illuminating the sky, rose; the previous night’s near-full moon sets in the painting’s west. Some fifteen figures populate the vineyard, and the wicker basket filled with grapes, visible on the back of one of these figures, would have been emptied into the cart’s barrels.