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Lot Essay
In 1875, at the height of the Impressionist era, Pissarro painted a cluster of stone and brick houses situated in the rolling hills of Pontoise, a medieval village in the French countryside, 30 kilometers northwest of Paris. With thick strokes of oil paint, the artist conveyed the melting, cotton-white tufts of snow and ice, giving way to rocks and stretches of green grass beneath—as well as a thin silver ravine flowing between bare-limbed trees, stripped of their foliage by the cold. Pissarro never tired of the ever-changing rural landscape in Pontoise, and continued to capture it on canvas, even in the final gasps of winter. As Katherine Rothkopf has written, “For Pissarro, nature was at its most inspiring and colorful during the coldest time of year. It is his life long dedication to exploring all the motifs of winter that distinguishes him among his fellow painters of effets de neige” (Impressionists in Winter, Effet de Neige, exh. cat., The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1998, p. 54). According to Rothkopf, Pissarro exhibited at least nine winter views across the eight Impressionist exhibitions staged in Paris in the 1870s and1880s.
Pissarro lived with his partner, Julie Vellay, and their children in a series of rented houses in and around Pontoise between 1866 and 1869, and again between 1872 and 1882—after which the artist’s growing family moved to the nearby village of Osny. The present work depicts the artist’s own street, the rue de l’Hermitage, where he and his family lived in two different houses from 1873 through 1881. The rue de l’Hermitage was one of the primary arteries of the village, which lead from the outskirts of Pontoise towards the banks of the Oise river, a tributary of the Seine. According to Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, the artist devoted at least 300 canvases—in addition to many more works on paper—to the rural village and the surrounding countryside. According to Richard Bretell, this corpus forms “what is probably the most sustained portrait of a place painted by any French landscape painter in the nineteenth century" (Pissarro and Pontoise: The Painter in a Landscape, New Haven, 1990, p. 1).
Pissarro painted Effet de neige à L'Hermitage, Pontoise between the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and the second in 1876. Pissarro’s work had received some positive praise after the first show, but the artist was deeply discouraged by the negative critical responses, by the pitiful sales that resulted from the exhibition, and by his continued difficulty in securing new patrons; as he wrote to Theodore Duret in June 1874, “If you could unearth for me the rare man who likes modern painting and does not fear ridicule, I would be very grateful if you would point him in my direction” (quoted in J. Pissarro and C. Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, op. cit., Paris, 2005, vol. I, p. 144). Though the artist continued to struggle financially throughout 1875, his productivity was undeterred by the circumstances of money or weather; he continued to work throughout the seasons, capturing the Pontoise landscape in all of its many moods.
The painting remained with the artist until his death in 1903, when it was inherited by Georges Manzana-Pissarro, the artist’s fourth child and second son, who was four years old when this canvas was painted in 1875. The following year it was acquired by Galerie Bernheim-Jeune et Cie., Paris. This painting finally entered the collection of Ann and Gordon Getty in 1989.
Pissarro lived with his partner, Julie Vellay, and their children in a series of rented houses in and around Pontoise between 1866 and 1869, and again between 1872 and 1882—after which the artist’s growing family moved to the nearby village of Osny. The present work depicts the artist’s own street, the rue de l’Hermitage, where he and his family lived in two different houses from 1873 through 1881. The rue de l’Hermitage was one of the primary arteries of the village, which lead from the outskirts of Pontoise towards the banks of the Oise river, a tributary of the Seine. According to Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, the artist devoted at least 300 canvases—in addition to many more works on paper—to the rural village and the surrounding countryside. According to Richard Bretell, this corpus forms “what is probably the most sustained portrait of a place painted by any French landscape painter in the nineteenth century" (Pissarro and Pontoise: The Painter in a Landscape, New Haven, 1990, p. 1).
Pissarro painted Effet de neige à L'Hermitage, Pontoise between the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and the second in 1876. Pissarro’s work had received some positive praise after the first show, but the artist was deeply discouraged by the negative critical responses, by the pitiful sales that resulted from the exhibition, and by his continued difficulty in securing new patrons; as he wrote to Theodore Duret in June 1874, “If you could unearth for me the rare man who likes modern painting and does not fear ridicule, I would be very grateful if you would point him in my direction” (quoted in J. Pissarro and C. Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, op. cit., Paris, 2005, vol. I, p. 144). Though the artist continued to struggle financially throughout 1875, his productivity was undeterred by the circumstances of money or weather; he continued to work throughout the seasons, capturing the Pontoise landscape in all of its many moods.
The painting remained with the artist until his death in 1903, when it was inherited by Georges Manzana-Pissarro, the artist’s fourth child and second son, who was four years old when this canvas was painted in 1875. The following year it was acquired by Galerie Bernheim-Jeune et Cie., Paris. This painting finally entered the collection of Ann and Gordon Getty in 1989.