CAMILLE PISSARRO, (1830-1903)

Paysanne

Paysanne
signed 'C. Pissarro' (lower right) and inscribed 'corsage à pois blancs irréguliers fond noir violacé' (upper right)
charcoal on paper
12 x 10 13/16 in (30.5 x 27.5 cm)
Executed in the early 1880s

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Dr. Joachim Pissarro. This work will be included in the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné of Drawings by Camille Pissarro, currently being prepared.

Provenance
Orovida Camille Pissarro Collection, London (the artist's granddaughter).
Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans Collection, North Carolina (possibly acquired circa 1970s).
Thence by descent.
Sarah Trent Lucas Harris Collection, North Carolina (bequeathed from the above in 2012).
Gifted from the above to the present owner in 2013.

In Paysanne, Camille Pissarro intimately captures the peasant's experience in the pastoral heartland. In 1880, the artist began a large series of figure paintings of rural women, presented as working or at rest in a provincial environment, far from the flux of the urban life. In addition to the landscape, his primary focus was the interrelationship amongst the figures. The present drawing was likely executed as a figure study for a painting from this series, where the female figures are characterized as strong and hardy, rather than willowy and graceful, in a simple peasant costume. Indeed, the figure in Paysanne shares particular similarities to the central female figure in the foreground of the gouache Paysannes travaillant dans les champs, Pontoise, executed in 1881. Although the figure in the present lot is viewed in three quarter profile, both figures share the same arched pose as they lean towards the ground, slightly bending their arms and heads bowed. Both figures wear a simple blouse tucked into a skirt with a scarf wrapped tightly around their hair.

At the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition of 1882, the art critic J. K. Huysman stated: "Pissarro has entirely detached himself from Millet's memory. He paints his country people without false grandeur, simply as he sees them. His delicious little girls in their red stockings, his old woman wearing a kerchief, his shepherdesses and laundresses, his peasant girls cutting hay or eating, are all true small masterpieces" (J. K. Huysman quoted in J. Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, New York, 1993, p. 157). In contrast to Jean Millet's depiction of peasants in backbreaking labor, Pissarro depicts his peasants in a more relaxed sense. This archetypal figure seen in Paysanne testifies to Pissarro's non-romanticized revelation of the rural peasant's toils of daily life, her pose symbolic of the universal humanity of the rural laborer.

The inscription 'O.C.P. (B.) II ii a.19.' at the lower right reveals that this drawing once belonged to Camille Pissarro's granddaughter, Orovida Camille Pissarro. The only child of Pissarro's oldest son, Lucien Pissarro, Orovida inherited a number of the artist's drawings from her father.