Pissarro Paintings and Works on Paper at the Art Institute of Chicago

Although Pissarro’s landscape drawings of the 1850s and 1860s count among the highlights of his career as a graphic artist, they have been little studied and are thus frustratingly difficult either to place or date.1 This sheet, a [glossary:graphite] drawing done in the manner of Camille Corot, has been dated as late as 1880 but was surely made early in the 1860s, when Pissarro first began to visit the farm of his friend and fellow anarchist Ludovic Piette, who lived in Mayenne, a small region bridging Normandy and Brittany (fig. 1.1). In fact, the single closest work in the Pissarro literature is Landscape in Montfoucault (fig. 1.2 [PDRS 97]), formerly in the collection of the painter’s son, Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro, who was named in memory of Piette.2 It seems likely that the Art Institute’s sheet is a product of Pissarro and Piette’s early friendship in the 1860s, as Pissarro’s first stay at Piette’s farm in Montfoucault took place sometime in the fall and winter of 1864; this is in keeping with the bare trees in this work and Pissarro’s painted depictions of the landscape, with their rich reddish-brown hues and trees bare of foliage (fig. 1.3 and fig. 1.4 [PDRS 96 and 98]).3 On this visit, Pissarro was accompanied by his wife and son Lucien, and what was planned as a brief trip ended up lasting six weeks, marking the beginning of a friendship that would see the Pissarro family return throughout the 1870s.4 Although the relationship between the drawing and the painting is not direct, the landscapes represented in each are so close as to secure identification of the site. Fortunately—especially in the absence of some defining architecture or topography—Pissarro inscribed the back of the canvas Étude faite à Montfoucault en 1864, crevée par les Prussiens et restaurée par mon ami A. Gauthier (Study done at Montfoucault in 1864, sliced by the Prussians and restored by my friend A. Gauthier).5

The Art Institute’s sheet demonstrates Pissarro’s fascination with the structure of trees, and the timing of his first visit to Montfoucault facilitated precisely this kind of detailed study (see fig. 1.3 and fig. 1.4). The drawing can also be linked to other published landscape studies catalogued by Christopher Lloyd and myself and related to other known sheets discussed in the entries for those drawings.6 These earlier drawings—two identified as landscapes in La Roche-Guyon from the late 1850s and early 1860s (fig. 1.5 and fig. 1.6) and two others depicting similar topography (fig. 1.7 and fig. 1.8), and a dated La Roche-Guyon sketch (see fig. 1.9) that is very similar in its composition and natural topography—share features with the Art Institute’s sheet, namely the clean handling of lines reminiscent of Corot’s drawings from the 1820s and 1830s. Indeed, Corot was one of the nineteenth-century draftsmen that Pissarro greatly admired. Although it may be tempting to date the Art Institute’s sheet to the late 1850s or early 1860s, Pissarro made similar autumn landscapes during his 1864 stay at Piette’s farm. That fall the artist also appears to have heeded Corot’s advice from 1857 to go into the fields because the muse was there waiting in the woods.7

The dominant motif throughout these early works is trees, recalling the compositions of the Barbizon school, particularly those of Corot and Théodore Rousseau.8 It is possible that Pissarro used a similar paper for these landscape studies, as the grayish-blue tonality of this sheet is comparable to that of the paper he employed for the two La Roche-Guyon sketches (fig. 1.5 and fig. 1.6; see Media and Support in the technical report). Both of these latter works are similar in size to this drawing, perhaps an indication that Pissarro sketched on larger sheets if using them as the matrix for the creation of subsequent paintings. The catalogue of Pissarro drawings from the Ashmolean Museum includes some other landscape studies from this period that are also comparable in size to this sheet, some of which were possibly reworked into paintings.9 Landscape in Montfoucault may have been used in this way as well, as the path and mountain range in the distance also appear in the related painting (fig. 1.2); Pissarro even placed a woman in the composition to highlight the trail clearly visible in the Art Institute’s sheet.

The delicacy of this drawing directly contrasts with the boldly hatched landscapes Pissarro did before his arrival in France in 1855 and his meeting with Corot shortly thereafter.10 It is a sheet marked by restraint, less the product of a brash young man than that of an artist trying to learn a discipline.
Richard R. Brettell