.jpg?w=1)
Descrizione dettagliata lotto
This fan-shaped work, designed to be mounted on a wall rather than used, was likely included in the fourth impressionist exhibition of 1879, where Pissarro presented 12 fans. The format offered artists a chance to play with new compositions while challenging the distinction between fine and the decorative arts. While Degas's fans took as their subjects scenes of the opera and ballet, Pissarro twisted convention by depicting scenes of rural life. He repurposed the fan, often associated with the fashionable Parisian set, as a platform for provincial everyday life. Thus, in Enfants jouant sur une route, Pissarro marries the novelty of impressionist ideas with history and tradition.
Pissarro's feathery strokes evoke the transience of this snapshot in time, as well as the ephemerality of a fan as it flutters back and forth. At the time of Enfants jouant sur une route's creation, Pissarro lived in the historic town of Pontoise, north-west of Paris. As Joachim Pissarro writes, "Pissarro's work in Pontoise reaches a depth and potency of distinction and complexity that induce the onlooker to share his experience of space, of distance, and of separation" (J. Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, New York, 1993, p. 121). Indeed, the viewer regards this street scene as though through a keyhole—an intimate, true slice of life.
Pissarro's feathery strokes evoke the transience of this snapshot in time, as well as the ephemerality of a fan as it flutters back and forth. At the time of Enfants jouant sur une route's creation, Pissarro lived in the historic town of Pontoise, north-west of Paris. As Joachim Pissarro writes, "Pissarro's work in Pontoise reaches a depth and potency of distinction and complexity that induce the onlooker to share his experience of space, of distance, and of separation" (J. Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, New York, 1993, p. 121). Indeed, the viewer regards this street scene as though through a keyhole—an intimate, true slice of life.