Lot Essay
Camille Pissarro moved his family back to Pontoise, located in the northwest of Paris, in August 1872 where he had previously lived from 1867 to 1869. In the interim period he had lived in Louveciennes and visited London, but the poor sales of his paintings put severe financial constraints on him, and he hoped that Pontoise would again provide him with a favorable setting for his work. For the next ten years Pissarro's life and work would become closely linked to the town. He painted more than three hundred pictures of it and its surrounding countryside. These canvases pay homage to the rural solitude that also attracted Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin who came there to work with him in 1877, the same year that Verger à Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône en hiver was painted. The paintings he produced during his years in Pontoise "form what is probably the most sustained portrait of a place painted by any French landscape painter in the nineteenth century" (R. Bretell, Pissarro and Pontoise: The Painter in a Landscape, New Haven, 1990, p. 1).
The orchard was a motif that Pissarro painted repeatedly during different seasons and in varying weather conditions. As Christoph Becker notes: "In the eyes of Pissarro's own contemporaries, the explosive quality of these works lay precisely in their rejection both of complex themes and of traditionally practiced techniques" ("Camille Pissarro, Impressionist Artist," Camille Pissarro, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1999, p. 77). In Verger à Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône en hiver he depicts the buildings of the village as seen through barren branches, and the composition follows a formula that is representative of his oeuvre from these years. The trees and the steeple of the Church of Notre-Dame create strong verticals that contrast with the horizontals of the landscape. To provide a focal point and enliven the composition, Pissarro added the single asymmetrical form of the tree in the foreground. The deft application of vivid color underscores the sense of immediacy to the scene. In his defense of the Impressionists following their third exhibition in 1877, the art critic Théodore Duret wrote: "[Pissarro is] the one in whose work one finds in the most accentuated manner the point of view of the purely naturalistic painters. He sees nature in simplifying it and through its most permanent aspect. His canvases communicate to the highest degree the sensation of space and of solidity; they set free an impression of melancholy" (quoted in J. Rewald, Pissarro, New York, 1989, p. 86).
The orchard was a motif that Pissarro painted repeatedly during different seasons and in varying weather conditions. As Christoph Becker notes: "In the eyes of Pissarro's own contemporaries, the explosive quality of these works lay precisely in their rejection both of complex themes and of traditionally practiced techniques" ("Camille Pissarro, Impressionist Artist," Camille Pissarro, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1999, p. 77). In Verger à Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône en hiver he depicts the buildings of the village as seen through barren branches, and the composition follows a formula that is representative of his oeuvre from these years. The trees and the steeple of the Church of Notre-Dame create strong verticals that contrast with the horizontals of the landscape. To provide a focal point and enliven the composition, Pissarro added the single asymmetrical form of the tree in the foreground. The deft application of vivid color underscores the sense of immediacy to the scene. In his defense of the Impressionists following their third exhibition in 1877, the art critic Théodore Duret wrote: "[Pissarro is] the one in whose work one finds in the most accentuated manner the point of view of the purely naturalistic painters. He sees nature in simplifying it and through its most permanent aspect. His canvases communicate to the highest degree the sensation of space and of solidity; they set free an impression of melancholy" (quoted in J. Rewald, Pissarro, New York, 1989, p. 86).