Brief Report

Pissarro's large-scale painting L'Hermitage near Pontoise is among his early masterpieces and belongs to a group of pictures intended for the Paris Salon exhibition of 1868. It cannot be ascertained with certainty, however, whether this painting was in fact exhibited there [Tinterow/Loyrette 1994, p. 446; Pissarro/Durand-Ruel Snollaerts 2005, Vol. II, no. 119, p. 111]. In about 1930 the picture was purchased by Ambroise Vollard from Pissarro's son, Georges Manzana-Pissarro, and it is perhaps in connexion with this purchase that the lining of the stable, twill-weave canvas is to be understood. Even with the unaided eye, and strikingly so under raking light, it is evident that the robust canvas had already been painted on when Pissarro started the depiction of the manor house we see here. This is evidenced by surface structures deviating from the visible composition, which have to be assigned to the underlying painting (figs. 3, 7). The X-ray picture reveals a totally different scene with broad fields, a higher horizon and a bridge in the foreground (Abb. 4). A picture by Pissarro with a very similar motif to this latter is in the possession of the Musée d'Orsay, and titled The Route d'Ennery near Pontoise, which is dated seven years later. It is true that this latter painting is much smaller, and the beholder's standpoint is not the same, but the depiction of the same hilly landscape in a neighbouring valley is unmistakable (fig. 14). The reason why Pissarro rejected this first motif is unclear, and may be linked to his financial situation at the time. Without adding a separating layer, he very carefully overpainted the first motif with the scene we see today. It is impossible to say how much time elapsed between the first painting and the present one. It is striking, though, that very few early shrinkage cracks developed, and these, together with occasional unpainted areas in the new picture, provide valuable evidence regarding the coloration of the rejected composition: the dominant tones were a bright pale blue in the sky, green, dull yellowish- green and ochre in the foreground and blackishgrey along the horizon (figs. 11, 12). When depicting the visible L'Hermitage near Pontoise, the artist used brushes and spatula or palette knife alternately. Pissarro thus modelled the surface of the impasto paint in a very discriminating fashion and almost sculpturally (figs. 7, 8). Even though individual paint applications blend into each other wet-in-wet, dry phases can be established beyond doubt, so that we may presume that Pissarro painted the picture in a number of sessions (figs. 9, 10). Two fingerprints in the peripheral region of the grey sky are presumably the artist's own, additionally manifesting his presence in the painting (fig. 13). The autograph signature and date were executed wet on dry after the painting was complete (fig. 6).

Camille Pissarro
L´Hermitage at Pontoise, 1867, oil on canvas, 91.0 x 150.5 cm, WRM 3119

Camille Pissarro

born on 10 July in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, Danish West Indies,
died on 12 November 1903 in Éragny-sur-Epte

Brief report with complete data as downloadable pdf-file

Further illustrations:

Fig. 02

Verso, lined


Fig. 03

Raking light


Fig. 04

X-ray


Fig. 05

Twill-weave canvas, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)


Fig. 06

Detail, signature with detail enlarged, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm), arrows indicate early shrinkage cracking, which affects the paint layer including the signature


Fig. 07

Detail, virtuoso use of brush and spatula; underlying diagonal structures of the first, rejected, painting are discernible


Fig. 08

Detail in raking light, traces of spatula and brush


Fig. 09

Detail of figure in left foreground, which was painted on an already dry paint layer


Fig. 10

Example of wet-in-wet painting, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)


Fig. 11

Unpainted areas within the spatula-applied grey paint in the region of the sky; revealing the bright pale blue beneath, which belongs to the first painting, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)


Fig. 12

Early shrinkage cracks in the visible painting, which reveal the ochre paint layer of the rejected painting (in the region of the hand of the man in the left foreground), microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)


Fig. 13

Detail in raking light, fingerprint of Pissarro(?) in the top left-hand corner


Fig. 14

Camille Pissarro, The Route d'Ennery near Pontoise, 1874, h 55.0 x b 92.0 cm, Musée d'Orsay, Paris; the composition is strikingly similar to that in the X-ray of the first compositional lay-in of the painting in Cologne