Manhã de Outono em Éragny, França (Matinée d'Automne à Éragny) - Camille Pissarro

 

Manhã de Outono em Éragny, França (Matinée d'Automne à Éragny) - Camille Pissarro
Éragny - França
Coleção privada
OST - 54x65 - 1902


Painted in 1902, Matinée d'automne à Éragny depicts the landscape near Camille Pissarro’s house in Éragny, a small village situated on the banks of the river Epte, a few kilometres from Gisors. Pissarro moved his family there in the spring of 1884 and was struck by the tranquillity of this rural hinterland and the artistic stimulation it offered. He rented a house which he described as, ‘wonderful and not too dear: a thousand francs with gardens and field’ (Letter to L. Pissarro, 1884, in J. Rewald (ed.), Camille Pissarro: Letters to his son Lucien, New York, 1972, p. 58). In 1892 he bought the house with the help of a loan from Claude Monet who lived in the neighbouring village of Giverny; it remained the artist’s principal home until his death in 1903.
Showing the verdant meadow which bordered the Pissarro house, Matinée d'automne à Éragny is a richly atmospheric depiction of a landscape in autumn, conjuring the rural way of life that surrounded Pissarro in Éragny. The central motifs are skilfully combined to create a vignette that imbues this scene with a sense of vitality. For Pissarro, this was the place where man, art and nature existed harmoniously, ordered only by the rural calendar and the cycle of the seasons.
Pissarro’s move to Éragny marked a turning point in his œuvre as his paintings became genuine odes to rural life and agriculture. He relished painting in this location which he came to know so well; he was familiar with every inch of meadow, the lining of the trees and the rooftops of the neighbouring houses. Like Monet's paintings of the French landscape and practice of working in series, Pissarro valued the importance of repeatedly returning to a fixed or familiar motif. Both artists favoured this practice as it allowed the subject of their works to be secondary to the exploration of light and colour, at different hours of the day, and in various weather and seasons.
As Edmund Capon highlights, ‘there is in Pissarro’s work a subtle social and political sensibility, one determined by scruple and consideration. It is evident not only in the sheer authenticity of his close inspection and rendering of air, clouds, trees, foliage, buildings and the fleeting passage of light but equally in his obvious empathy for the human condition, for workers, peasants and people in general – whether the lone toiler in the fields or the bustling crowds on the boulevard' (Camille Pissarro (exhibition catalogue), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney & National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2006, p. 12). During his years in Éragny, Pissarro would visit urban areas for several months to meet dealers, friends and acquaintances, travelling from the lively boulevards of Paris to the busy ports of Rouen and Le Havre and even occasionally to London. He inevitably returned to his bucolic existence in Éragny; his refuge and the ideal antidote for these tiring excursions, where the familiar countryside renewed his vigour and inspiration.
Matinée d'automne à Éragny is a wonderful example of the artist’s late work, exemplifying the distinctive blend of Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist styles that Pissarro had developed by this stage of his career. His first major retrospective held at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1892 was a critical and commercial success which brought a degree of stability and confidence to his later life and validated him as one of the most prominent avant-garde painters of his generation. In his old age, as a master of both Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism, Pissarro found a bold assurance, expressing his subjects in a uniquely direct way. His first involvement with Neo-Impressionism was in 1885, when he met Paul Signac and Georges Seurat; fascinated by the scientific approach of applying pure colours in small dots, he was invigorated by the company of this young group and their atmosphere of artistic revolution. He took up the Pointillist baton with fervour for the next few years, exemplified in works such as Gelée blanche, jeune paysanne faisant du feu, although his fellow-Impressionists - Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Caillebotte – looked upon the new movement with caution. By the end of the decade, however, Pissarro found the proscriptive divisionism to be increasingly time consuming and tiresome, causing his strict adherence to the ‘dot’ to waver. From the 1890s onwards, he gradually returned to nature, working outside as opposed to in the studio. In 1896, in a letter to his son Lucien, the artist exclaimed ‘…it feels so good to me to work outdoors again. It has been two years since I last attempted this adventure’ (quoted in Camille Pissarro: Impressionist Innovator (exhibition catalogue), Jerusalem, The Israel Museum & New York, The Jewish Museum, 1994, p. 172).
In Matinée d'automne à Éragny, Pissarro renders interlacing branches with leaves of dark green and brown, capturing the changing light on the foliage during this pleasant autumn morning. A horse is gently grazing while a figure works the field. From the thicker paint in the foreground to the feathered brushstrokes of the trees and sky in the distance, the paint application is varied and intuitive. No longer constrained by the systemic approach of Pointillism, his late landscapes gained in rhythm and spontaneity. The present work exhibits this free approach through the combination of individual dashes of pure pigment (retained from his Neo-Impressionist phase) and the atmospheric blend of softer colours, enhancing the effects of light and movement.
Spanning nearly two decades, Pissarro’s Éragny period comprises an ambitious corpus devoted to celebrating his beloved landscape at different times of the day, under differing weather conditions. As Joachim Pissarro has written: ‘his representations of these fields and gardens constitute the most spectacularly intense pictorial effort to ‘cover’ a particular given space in his career […]. The years that he spent in Éragny undeniably constitute a significant episode in the history of late Impressionism’ (J. Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, New York, 1993, p. 241). With its richly textured surface, Matinée d'automne à Éragny is a particularly masterful example from this body of work, revealing Pissarro’s Impressionist sensibility while paying homage to his engagement with Neo-Impressionist theory.
The work was inherited by the artist’s son, Lucien Pissarro in 1904. In 1941 it was acquired directly from Lucien and Esther Pissarro by the distinguished collectors Stella and Alexander Margulies. In correspondance held in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Stella writes to Lucien Pissarro that she is already the proud owner of one of his works and would like to visit him with a view to acquiring another. In a letter dated 23rd October 1941, Stella Margulies writes: 'I can assure you that it has been a very great pleasure, for both of us to meet the happy family 'Pissarro', and it will always be a very happy memory to us. I do hope this beastly war will soon finish and we shall have an opportunity of meeting you more often'. It was evidently a very positive encounter, with the Margulies purchasing works by both Camille and Lucien to add to their collection.