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拍品专文
Sous-bois à Moret dates from the artist's second sojourn in Moret-sur-Loing, located to the southeast of Fontainebleau. Pissarro's son, Georges, took up residence there at 28 rue de la Pêcherie in 1899 and strongly encouraged his father to visit, lauding the views of the river Loing from his garden. This medieval village had most notably been immortalised in paintings by Pissarro's fellow Impressionist, Alfred Sisley, who died in 1899. While recognising its charms, Pissarro also sought inspiration in the surrounding countryside. This provided a contrast with his city paintings of Dieppe in 1901 and of the Place Dauphine, Paris series of 1901-1902. These changes in locale enabled him to vary his motifs, mixing new series of urban scenes with his more familiar rural landscapes and domestic subjects. His initial visit to Moret in 1901 was followed by a second from May to June 1902, when the present work was painted. The wet weather in May forced the artist to remain indoors, however by the end of June he had completed nine landscape paintings, including the present work.
The last decade of Pissarro's life was marked by a return to Impressionism, pure in style, characterised by technical virtuosity, renewed confidence in compositional structure and a freer handling of pigment. His work retained vestiges of his experimentation with the pointillist approach of Neo-Impressionism, but he abstained from a strict adherence to it from 1890 partly because this time-consuming technique restricted his efforts to treat the variety of motifs that interested him, and he had come to realize that this discipline had become an unnecessary artifice that stood between the power of his sensations before nature and the unforced naturalness for which he strived in his painting. The artist thus resolved his stylistic problems, and his subsequent oeuvre is imbued with renewed optimism and enthusiasm for the subject.
The critic George Lecomte observed: 'If the painter powerfully elucidates the fecundity of the soil, the germinations, the luxuriant growths, and the noble breadth of the earth's modulations, he always populates his fertile fields with active peasants and living animals. Creatures and objects emerge with a shining clarity: air circulates around them; dazzling vapours of gold cast halos around them. It is the glorious rapture of nature dressed overall. There is always the calming sense of space, so silent, and without any disturbance other than that, so appropriately harmonizing, of the [sun] throwing out its light. It is the essence of the countryside, the spirit of the fields that these melodious symphonies reveal' (quoted in C. Lloyd, Pissarro, New York, 1981, p. 112).
The last decade of Pissarro's life was marked by a return to Impressionism, pure in style, characterised by technical virtuosity, renewed confidence in compositional structure and a freer handling of pigment. His work retained vestiges of his experimentation with the pointillist approach of Neo-Impressionism, but he abstained from a strict adherence to it from 1890 partly because this time-consuming technique restricted his efforts to treat the variety of motifs that interested him, and he had come to realize that this discipline had become an unnecessary artifice that stood between the power of his sensations before nature and the unforced naturalness for which he strived in his painting. The artist thus resolved his stylistic problems, and his subsequent oeuvre is imbued with renewed optimism and enthusiasm for the subject.
The critic George Lecomte observed: 'If the painter powerfully elucidates the fecundity of the soil, the germinations, the luxuriant growths, and the noble breadth of the earth's modulations, he always populates his fertile fields with active peasants and living animals. Creatures and objects emerge with a shining clarity: air circulates around them; dazzling vapours of gold cast halos around them. It is the glorious rapture of nature dressed overall. There is always the calming sense of space, so silent, and without any disturbance other than that, so appropriately harmonizing, of the [sun] throwing out its light. It is the essence of the countryside, the spirit of the fields that these melodious symphonies reveal' (quoted in C. Lloyd, Pissarro, New York, 1981, p. 112).