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Lot Essay
Around 1880, as the first full decade of Impressionism drew to a close, Pissarro embarked upon an intensive period of aesthetic exploration. His brushwork evolved toward a densely packed web of small touches in lieu of the loose, irregular handling of Impressionist practice; his landscape production dwindled in favor of large-scale figure painting, and he increasingly incorporated preparatory drawing, print-making, and studio work into his creative process. “These varied interests suggest a fundamental questioning of the kind of painting normally associated with Impressionism, the plein air sketch,” Richard Brettell has written, “and a more complicated, highly mediated relationship with ‘reality’ than a simple optical one” (op. cit., 1990, p. 184). This sea-change in Pissarro’s approach is clearly manifest in the present Paysannes dans les champs, painted in 1880 and sold the following year.
Depicting an open field bordering a copse of tall trees near the artist’s long-time home at Pontoise, the canvas is a new version—created in the studio—of a composition that Pissarro had painted en plein air in 1875 and shown four years later at the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition (Pissarro and Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, no. 414). Although the landscape motif is nearly identical in both canvases, Pissarro here systematized the brushwork and purified the color harmonies, brightening the prevailing blues and greens and adding a sequence of complementary orange accents, to imbue the scene with a heightened sense of structure and recessive space. Whereas the human protagonists in the older painting are mere specks in the landscape, now they are rendered as volumetrically modeled forms—almost classicizing in their solidity—with a central role in organizing the composition. The peasant woman at the left, stooping gracefully to fill her harvest basket, provides the viewer with a point of entry into the scene; her companion swivels around to observe the duo with a mule in the middle distance, her gaze drawing our own eye into depth. “Pissarro chose one of his most Impressionist pictures,” Brettell has concluded, “enlarged the figures, and ordered the facture to produce a masterpiece in no way related to the casual, plein air aesthetic of the earlier picture” (ibid., p. 191).
Depicting an open field bordering a copse of tall trees near the artist’s long-time home at Pontoise, the canvas is a new version—created in the studio—of a composition that Pissarro had painted en plein air in 1875 and shown four years later at the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition (Pissarro and Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, no. 414). Although the landscape motif is nearly identical in both canvases, Pissarro here systematized the brushwork and purified the color harmonies, brightening the prevailing blues and greens and adding a sequence of complementary orange accents, to imbue the scene with a heightened sense of structure and recessive space. Whereas the human protagonists in the older painting are mere specks in the landscape, now they are rendered as volumetrically modeled forms—almost classicizing in their solidity—with a central role in organizing the composition. The peasant woman at the left, stooping gracefully to fill her harvest basket, provides the viewer with a point of entry into the scene; her companion swivels around to observe the duo with a mule in the middle distance, her gaze drawing our own eye into depth. “Pissarro chose one of his most Impressionist pictures,” Brettell has concluded, “enlarged the figures, and ordered the facture to produce a masterpiece in no way related to the casual, plein air aesthetic of the earlier picture” (ibid., p. 191).