Canards sur l'étang de Montfoucault

Details

Camille Pissarro (1830-1903)
Canards sur l'étang de Montfoucault
signed 'C. Pissarro' (lower right)
oil on canvas
18 1/8 x 21 5/8 in. (46 x 55 cm.)
Painted circa 1874

Provenance

Léon Orosdi, Paris; his sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 25 May 1923, lot 46.
Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris, by whom acquired at the above sale.
Jacques Dubourg, Paris, by whom acquired from the above in October 1936.
Galerie de l'Elysée (Alex Maguy), Paris.
Mme Lipmann, Paris.
C.W. Boise, Kent; his sale, Sotheby's, London, 24 April 1968, lot 68.
Jack Josey, Houston, by whom acquired at the above sale.
Lenoir M. Josey, Houston, circa 1982.
Tor Arne Uppstrom, Oslo.
Anonymous sale, Sotheby's, London, 2 December 1986, lot 16.
Private collection, by whom acquired at the above sale; sale, Christie's, New York, 9 November 2000, lot 124.
Richard Green, London, by whom acquired at the above sale.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in March 2001.

Literature

H. Lapauze, 'La Collection de Léon Orosdi', in La Renaissance, Paris, May 1923, p. 231 (illustrated).
A. Tabarant, Pissarro, Paris, 1924 (illustrated).
L.-R. Pissarro & L. Venturi, Camille Pissarro: son art - son oeuvre, vol. I, Paris, 1939, no. 318, p. 125 (illustrated vol. II, pl. 64).
L.-R. Pissarro & L. Venturi, Camille Pissarro: son art - son oeuvre, vol. I, San Francisco, 1989, no. 318, p. 125 (illustrated vol. II, pl. 64).
J. Pissarro & C. Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro: catalogue critique des peintures, vol. II, Paris, 2005, no. 373 (illustrated p. 284).

Exhibited

Paris, Galerie Marcel Bernheim, Les peintres de l'eau, December 1923 - January 1924, no. 40.
London, Leicester Galleries, Paintings by Sisley, Renoir, Pissarro, Monet, Boudin, and Cassatt, April - May 1936, no. 19.
New York, Hammer Galleries, Decades of Light: Early Modern French Painting (1870-1910), October 1980.
Amarillo, Texas, Amarillo Art Center, Early French Moderns: The Genesis of the Modern Era, August - November 1982, no. 6 (illustrated).

Special Notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 15% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

Lot Essay

Canards sur l'étang de Montfoucault belongs to a period in Pissarro's oeuvre of intensive experimentation with peasant life and rural imagery. Pissarro had visited Montfoucault, where his close friend Ludovic Piette had a property, on six separate occasions between 1864 and 1876, but it was the lengthy trips of 1874, 1875 and 1876, to stay with Piette, which were to have such an influence on Pissarro's style. 'By the late spring of 1874, Pissarro had altered his palette, his facture, his iconography, and his attitude toward pictorial space to form a new style almost at odds with that of the classic Pontoise period' (R. Brettell, Pissarro and Pontoise: The Painter in a Landscape, London, 1990, p. 162). The rural landscape of Montfoucault, in the Mayenne, on the edge of Normandy and Brittany, was very different from that of the modernized countryside of Pontoise. Piette's small isolated farm with its own enclosed fields and the nearby pond, gave a structure to the rural imagery Pissarro began to paint which encouraged new departures in the artist's approach and technique. 'Pissarro's facture became more dense and his brushstrokes broader. His attention turned from distantly viewed landscapes to the concentrated space of the barnyard and the sheer physicality of form - its weight, mass and proximity - became Pissarro's overriding concern in the Montfoucault period and that reality was expressed by the material presence of paint itself. Pissarro layered paint on the surface to suggest mass and weight in a manner matched in the period only by Cézanne' (R. Bretell, Pissarro and Pontoise, The Painter in a Landscape, London, 1990, p. 165).

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