.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
On Monday mornings, Camille Pissarro often joined his wife Julie and a couple of their children, with some household helpers, for the two-and-a-half-mile excursion from their home in Éragny to attend market day in Gisors, a town of about four thousand inhabitants further down the Epte River. While Julie stocked up on produce and provisions for the coming week, Pissarro sketched the many people from Gisors and nearby villages who gathered among the stalls set up on the Grand-Rue (today the rue de Vienne) near the town hall, as they engaged in selling, buying, or bartering, exchanging news, and socializing during this all-important, weekly communal event.
The simple human interaction in this pre-capitalist exchange of goods appealed to Pissarro’s life-long dedication to the fundamental principles of non-violent anarchist theory: egalitarianism, freedom from tyranny, the satisfaction derived from honest, unexploited labor, and a belief in the evolution of society toward a more peaceable and harmonious condition. From the drawn studies Pissarro elaborated a key theme in his later oeuvre—le marché, the market scene. He typically peopled these pictures with more figures in various postures than a viewer can readily count. The artist completed between 1880 and 1901 around three dozen gouaches and pastels of this kind, as well as numerous other works on paper, including prints.
The present Le Marché de Gisors is one of only five versions of this genre that Pissarro painted in oils on canvas; none is more than 32 inches (82 cm.) in height. Pissarro intended to market these socially-themed pictures to a wide public. In the hope of appealing to buyers of lesser means, who shied away from the prices dealers asked for large oil paintings, he valued these more modestly scaled scenes, in oil or gouache, at affordable levels.
The initial public appearance of the market subject in Pissarro’s work were three gouaches, painted in Pontoise, which the artist included in the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition, 1882. The present canvas, completed several years later, is the first of the three that Pissarro painted in Éragny, his final home (the others are Pissarro and Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, no. 1013 [1893] and no. 1097 [1895]). The figures in Pissarro’s market scenes are predominantly women, in important roles as both providers and consumers. The artist understood the powerful matriarchal impetus that still shaped agrarian society at that time, as it had in antiquity and prehistory as well.
The simple human interaction in this pre-capitalist exchange of goods appealed to Pissarro’s life-long dedication to the fundamental principles of non-violent anarchist theory: egalitarianism, freedom from tyranny, the satisfaction derived from honest, unexploited labor, and a belief in the evolution of society toward a more peaceable and harmonious condition. From the drawn studies Pissarro elaborated a key theme in his later oeuvre—le marché, the market scene. He typically peopled these pictures with more figures in various postures than a viewer can readily count. The artist completed between 1880 and 1901 around three dozen gouaches and pastels of this kind, as well as numerous other works on paper, including prints.
The present Le Marché de Gisors is one of only five versions of this genre that Pissarro painted in oils on canvas; none is more than 32 inches (82 cm.) in height. Pissarro intended to market these socially-themed pictures to a wide public. In the hope of appealing to buyers of lesser means, who shied away from the prices dealers asked for large oil paintings, he valued these more modestly scaled scenes, in oil or gouache, at affordable levels.
The initial public appearance of the market subject in Pissarro’s work were three gouaches, painted in Pontoise, which the artist included in the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition, 1882. The present canvas, completed several years later, is the first of the three that Pissarro painted in Éragny, his final home (the others are Pissarro and Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, no. 1013 [1893] and no. 1097 [1895]). The figures in Pissarro’s market scenes are predominantly women, in important roles as both providers and consumers. The artist understood the powerful matriarchal impetus that still shaped agrarian society at that time, as it had in antiquity and prehistory as well.