Camille Pissarro Sentier dans un sous-bois (Path through the Undergrowth)

Camille Pissarro
French
1830 - 1903
Sentier dans un sous-bois (Path through the Undergrowth)

signed and dated Camille Pizarro 1856. (lower left)
oil on panel
panel: 5⅛ by 6⅞ in.; 13 by 17.4 cm
framed: 9 by 10¾ in.; 22.8 by 27.3 cm

Condition Report:
The panel is beveled on all edges, stable, and in good condition. The paint surface is stable and in good condition though lightly soiled. Upon close inspection, very fine patterns of vertical craquelure. Under UV light, minor scattered spots of retouching to the center foliage, left of the signature, and in the lower right corner.

Catalogue Note:
This early landscape by Camille Pissarro, often called the Father of Impressionism, materializes the important link between Barbizon school painting and the avant-garde movements championed by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Having trained alongside Claude Monet with Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Pissarro's early style was very much indebted to Realist painters Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet. He enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but eventually found their systematic instruction stifling and sought out Corot for private instruction. It was Corot who first inspired Pissarro to paint en plein air (outdoors)—a principle that would guide the likes of Monet, Paul Cézanne, and Georges Seurat. Pissarro ultimately traded Paris for the countryside and small villages along the Seine, finding suitable subjects in the shade of trees as he did here in this luminous intimately scaled painting of a path.

Provenance:
Sale: Drouot, Paris, 9 June 1964, no. 19
M. and Mme. Pierre Gabard
with Wally Findlay Galleries, New York, circa 1987
Private Collection, acquired from the above
with Schiller & Bodo, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 2017