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Lot Essay
Pissarro lived near the rural village of Pontoise for several years between 1866 and 1882. This pivotal period corresponds with the first seven Impressionist exhibitions, in which Pissarro was a major participant; he is the only artist to have participated in all eight exhibitions and to the exhibition of 1877 he submitted at least 22 canvases. In the winter of that year, Pissarro painted the present work, Terre labourée en hiver, avec un homme portant un fagot. This canvas exemplifies all of the formal characteristics of Pissarro’s work during a transformative phase of artistic collaboration and public exhibition: agricultural subject matter; a pale, luminous color palette; and loose, experimental brushwork.
Terre labourée en hiver depicts a hill of plowed land in the midst of winter, one of Pissarro’s preferred seasons in which to paint. The dormant plot of land is populated by two anonymous male laborers, one of whom carries a large bundle of hay or grain on his back—perhaps having just culled the remnants of the autumnal harvest. The barrenness of the season is further emphasized by the presence of a leafless tree at the center of the composition. Yet Pissarro animated this quiet winter scene with shocks of bright green, blue and pink, as if heralding the spring to come. These luminous colors were applied to the canvas in light, thin, energetic brushstrokes, densely layered to produce the illusory effect of earth, grass and sky.
In addition to its distinctive formal qualities, the present painting possesses a fascinating provenance. The first recorded owner of the painting was financier Ernest May (1845-1925), a major patron of the Impressionists. In 1878, a year after Pissarro painted the present work, Edgar Degas executed a now infamous portrait of the spectacled, thirty-three-year-old May working as an investor on the Paris stock exchange. By the late 1870s, May had begun to form relationships and acquire paintings by modern artists, such as Gustave Caillebotte, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Pissarro, in addition to French Old Masters of the 17th and 18th centuries.
In 1882, May sold Terre labourée en hiver to the renowned Impressionist dealers at Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie. in Paris—perhaps in response to the Paris stock market crash of that year, which was the worst economic crisis of the nineteenth century. Durand-Ruel in turn sold the work to Catholina Lambert, the wealthy American owner of a silk manufactory, in 1888. When Lambert’s business collapsed in 1914, he was forced to sell his enormous art collection at an auction organized by the American Art Association at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Lambert’s collection, which sold over the course of four days, comprised over 350 paintings: masterpieces by Sandro Botticelli and Rembrandt, as well as a large number of Impressionist pictures, including six canvases by Claude Monet, five by Pissarro and three by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
At the monumental Lambert sale, the present work was acquired by the New York branch of the Durand-Ruel Galleries; thereafter, it was featured in a 1936 exhibition devoted to Pissarro’s painting. Sometime in the second half of the twentieth century, the work entered the collection of the Midwest collector Maribel Blum, who bequeathed much of her estate to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1986. Terre labourée en hiver remained in Chicago for nearly three decades, until it was acquired by the present owner in 2015.
Terre labourée en hiver depicts a hill of plowed land in the midst of winter, one of Pissarro’s preferred seasons in which to paint. The dormant plot of land is populated by two anonymous male laborers, one of whom carries a large bundle of hay or grain on his back—perhaps having just culled the remnants of the autumnal harvest. The barrenness of the season is further emphasized by the presence of a leafless tree at the center of the composition. Yet Pissarro animated this quiet winter scene with shocks of bright green, blue and pink, as if heralding the spring to come. These luminous colors were applied to the canvas in light, thin, energetic brushstrokes, densely layered to produce the illusory effect of earth, grass and sky.
In addition to its distinctive formal qualities, the present painting possesses a fascinating provenance. The first recorded owner of the painting was financier Ernest May (1845-1925), a major patron of the Impressionists. In 1878, a year after Pissarro painted the present work, Edgar Degas executed a now infamous portrait of the spectacled, thirty-three-year-old May working as an investor on the Paris stock exchange. By the late 1870s, May had begun to form relationships and acquire paintings by modern artists, such as Gustave Caillebotte, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Pissarro, in addition to French Old Masters of the 17th and 18th centuries.
In 1882, May sold Terre labourée en hiver to the renowned Impressionist dealers at Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie. in Paris—perhaps in response to the Paris stock market crash of that year, which was the worst economic crisis of the nineteenth century. Durand-Ruel in turn sold the work to Catholina Lambert, the wealthy American owner of a silk manufactory, in 1888. When Lambert’s business collapsed in 1914, he was forced to sell his enormous art collection at an auction organized by the American Art Association at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Lambert’s collection, which sold over the course of four days, comprised over 350 paintings: masterpieces by Sandro Botticelli and Rembrandt, as well as a large number of Impressionist pictures, including six canvases by Claude Monet, five by Pissarro and three by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
At the monumental Lambert sale, the present work was acquired by the New York branch of the Durand-Ruel Galleries; thereafter, it was featured in a 1936 exhibition devoted to Pissarro’s painting. Sometime in the second half of the twentieth century, the work entered the collection of the Midwest collector Maribel Blum, who bequeathed much of her estate to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1986. Terre labourée en hiver remained in Chicago for nearly three decades, until it was acquired by the present owner in 2015.