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Lot Essay
Painted in 1894, Pissarro’s Femme se coiffant presents a young woman in an intimate, private moment of repose, pictured within an interior brushing her long auburn colored hair. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Pissarro depicted rural women engaged in a variety of everyday activities both amidst the landscape and within domestic interiors. Pictured often in quiet solitude sewing, reading or simply at rest, the female figures are painted with a statuesque monumentality that sets these figurative genre scenes apart from those of Pissarro’s Impressionist contemporaries, in particular the toilette scenes of Edgar Degas. At the same time as he painted the present work, Pissarro executed similar compositions in both gouache and pastel. The latter now resides in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
With its subtly nuanced color palette and mosaic-like surface of short, staccato brushstrokes, Femme se coiffant demonstrates the unique Pointillist-inspired technique that Pissarro had developed by this time. In the late 1880s, Pissarro had become one of the foremost champions of Neo-Impressionism, adopting the Pointillist technique of the movement’s leaders, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. By 1890 however, Pissarro started to distance himself from this movement. He realised that the protracted and painstaking method of applying paint in tiny dots according to scientific color theories inhibited a direct and evocative portrayal of the original motif. “How can one combine the purity and simplicity of the dot with the fullness, suppleness, liberty, spontaneity, and freshness of sensation postulated by our impressionist art?” he mused (Pissarro quoted in Camille Pissarro, Le premier des Impressionnistes, exh. cat., Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, 2017, p. 126). From 1890 onwards, Pissarro forged his own distinctive technique: merging the color theories and divisionist practice of Pointillism with the lightness, looseness and freedom of his Impressionist style. Encapsulating this distinctive painterly approach, the composition of Femme se coiffant is dominated by the subtly orchestrated combination of the complementary color pairing orange and turquoise. The rich jewel-like color of the figure’s shoes is echoed in the sweeping drapery atop the bed in the background, accentuated and illuminated by the dazzling shades of her orange skirt and tumbling hair.
Pissarro painted Femme se coiffant at a turbulent moment in his life. At the beginning of the year, he had suffered the losses of three of his oldest friends and key supporters: Gustave Caillebotte, the pioneering collector; Georges de Bellio; and the dealer Père Tanguy. Later in the year, he left Éragny and travelled to Belgium with his wife Julie and their son, Félix. This trip turned out to be extremely well-timed; a month after their arrival there, the French National Assembly ordered the arrest and round up of anarchists and sympathizers, which would have included even a peaceful sympathizer such as Pissarro. Unable to return to France, he remained in Belgium until the beginning of October. Femme se coiffant was most likely painted soon after his return.
With its subtly nuanced color palette and mosaic-like surface of short, staccato brushstrokes, Femme se coiffant demonstrates the unique Pointillist-inspired technique that Pissarro had developed by this time. In the late 1880s, Pissarro had become one of the foremost champions of Neo-Impressionism, adopting the Pointillist technique of the movement’s leaders, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. By 1890 however, Pissarro started to distance himself from this movement. He realised that the protracted and painstaking method of applying paint in tiny dots according to scientific color theories inhibited a direct and evocative portrayal of the original motif. “How can one combine the purity and simplicity of the dot with the fullness, suppleness, liberty, spontaneity, and freshness of sensation postulated by our impressionist art?” he mused (Pissarro quoted in Camille Pissarro, Le premier des Impressionnistes, exh. cat., Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, 2017, p. 126). From 1890 onwards, Pissarro forged his own distinctive technique: merging the color theories and divisionist practice of Pointillism with the lightness, looseness and freedom of his Impressionist style. Encapsulating this distinctive painterly approach, the composition of Femme se coiffant is dominated by the subtly orchestrated combination of the complementary color pairing orange and turquoise. The rich jewel-like color of the figure’s shoes is echoed in the sweeping drapery atop the bed in the background, accentuated and illuminated by the dazzling shades of her orange skirt and tumbling hair.
Pissarro painted Femme se coiffant at a turbulent moment in his life. At the beginning of the year, he had suffered the losses of three of his oldest friends and key supporters: Gustave Caillebotte, the pioneering collector; Georges de Bellio; and the dealer Père Tanguy. Later in the year, he left Éragny and travelled to Belgium with his wife Julie and their son, Félix. This trip turned out to be extremely well-timed; a month after their arrival there, the French National Assembly ordered the arrest and round up of anarchists and sympathizers, which would have included even a peaceful sympathizer such as Pissarro. Unable to return to France, he remained in Belgium until the beginning of October. Femme se coiffant was most likely painted soon after his return.