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Lot Essay
Included in the seminal Fifth Impressionist Exhibition that took place in 1880, Camille Pissarro’s Femme lavant une casserole encapsulates the quintessential Impressionist style and subject matter of the artist’s figure paintings. As well as rustic, quotidian scenes of the rural French landscape, Pissarro frequently painted women absorbed in daily activities. Indeed, from 1879, the year that he painted the present work, Pissarro began to create a number of monumental figure studies that reflected his growing interest in the primacy of the human form within the landscape setting, a theme that would continue throughout his career. Here, a woman is framed by blossoming shrubs and flowers, bending over slightly as she washes objects in a bowl. The theme of the washerwoman had appeared frequently in Pissarro’s art from 1875 onwards, a reflection of the artist’s desire to capture rural life in his art.
Femme lavant une casserole demonstrates the way in which Pissarro’s painterly technique changed at the end of the 1870s. Pissarro replaced his painterly, Impressionist style with small, comma-like brushstrokes that he built up in layers on the surface of the canvas. “There is little about it that is fleeting or ephemeral,” Richard Brettell has described Pissarro’s surfaces after 1879, “It is clear from the sheer multiplicity and the insistent minuteness of the strokes that the surface took a long time to create” (R. Brettell, Pissarro and Pontoise: The Painter in a Landscape, New Haven, 1990, p. 154). The painter’s artistic exchanges with Cézanne and intense collaboration with Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin in 1879 further fueled Pissarro’s nascent concerns. Describing this moment of transition, Brettell has written: “All these interests suggest a fundamental questioning of the kind of painting normally associated with Impressionism, the plein-air sketch, and a more complicated, highly mediated relationship with 'reality' than a simply optical one” (ibid., p. 184).
Paul Durand-Ruel acquired Femme lavant une casserole directly from Pissarro in 1881, before selling it, a few years later, to one of the leading Impressionist collectors of the time, the Yorkshire-born Catholina Lambert Paterson, who, in 1851 left Britain for a new life in America, where he acquired a large collection of Impressionist works, including Monet’s L’Escalier.
Femme lavant une casserole demonstrates the way in which Pissarro’s painterly technique changed at the end of the 1870s. Pissarro replaced his painterly, Impressionist style with small, comma-like brushstrokes that he built up in layers on the surface of the canvas. “There is little about it that is fleeting or ephemeral,” Richard Brettell has described Pissarro’s surfaces after 1879, “It is clear from the sheer multiplicity and the insistent minuteness of the strokes that the surface took a long time to create” (R. Brettell, Pissarro and Pontoise: The Painter in a Landscape, New Haven, 1990, p. 154). The painter’s artistic exchanges with Cézanne and intense collaboration with Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin in 1879 further fueled Pissarro’s nascent concerns. Describing this moment of transition, Brettell has written: “All these interests suggest a fundamental questioning of the kind of painting normally associated with Impressionism, the plein-air sketch, and a more complicated, highly mediated relationship with 'reality' than a simply optical one” (ibid., p. 184).
Paul Durand-Ruel acquired Femme lavant une casserole directly from Pissarro in 1881, before selling it, a few years later, to one of the leading Impressionist collectors of the time, the Yorkshire-born Catholina Lambert Paterson, who, in 1851 left Britain for a new life in America, where he acquired a large collection of Impressionist works, including Monet’s L’Escalier.