Cowherdess, Éragny
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| Gardeuse de vaches |
|---|
| Camille Pissarro , 1887 |
| gouache |
| 54 × 65 cm |
| Privately owned |
Cowherdess, Éragny ( French Gardeuse de vaches, Éragny ) is the title of a painting by Camille Pissarro from 1887. The artist often occupied himself with the motif of a young country woman tending cows. This picture was taken during a stay in Éragny , where Pissarro and his family had lived in a house since 1884. It shows a midsummer, peaceful scene in which a young woman with red cheeks sits leaning against the trunk in the shade of a tree and her grazing cows graze in the background. A white sheep stands behind the tree and looks at the viewer from a safe distance. The picture is in private hands.
History, image content and provenance
The painting is part of an important series in Pissarro's oeuvre with rural motifs showing rural women and villagers doing various everyday peasant chores and activities. It originated in the phase when the artist tried out pointillism , i.e. the application of paint with the smallest brushstrokes and dabs. In previous works on the subject Pissarro painted mostly country people who worked hard, but in this book he first time in his work Le Repos, paysanne dans couchée l'herbe (The rest, lying in the grass farmer) , painted in 1882 in Pontoise , a represents a resting, daydreaming person. Nothing about the pose of this resting woman tells anything about her thoughts, dreams or her story. The woman's work clothes consist of a blue headscarf to protect her hair when working with the cattle, a white linen dress with a blue apron and leather lace-up shoes. Their equipment for leading the cows consists of a herding stick. Several cattle graze in the pasture in the background of the picture. In pre-industrial agriculture, cows and sheep grazed peacefully on a pasture so that the abundant green forage of the meadows could be better used. In Pissarro's picture, however, there is no flock of sheep to be seen, but only a single, curious white sheep that looks at the artist and thus the viewer face-to-face . The sheep can be understood as a small allusion to the motif of the shepherd's hour , popular in art since the 18th century . In Pissarro's depictions of idle women, the art historian Richard Brettell sees a political statement on work, the division of labor and leisure. This explains that during the capitalist exploitation of the workers in the 19th century, the first viewers of the picture were unsettled about the allegedly depicted laziness of the farm workers and that Pissarro could therefore be misunderstood as apolitical.
The picture has a landscape format of 54 × 65 cm, is executed in the painting technique of gouache on paper and laid on a wooden board. The artist's signature and date are lower left: C. Pissarro. 1887 . On September 29, 1887, the picture came to the gallery of Pissarro's art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in Paris. The American industrialist and art collector Catholina Lambert from Paterson (New Jersey) bought it in April 1888 , but a year later it went back to Paris to Durand-Ruel. Around 1949 it ended up in a private collection in Illinois , where it remained until 1985, when it was transferred to another private collection. On 7 November 2012, the art auction house auctioned Christie's in New York, the painting Kuhhirtin for 662,500 US dollars. The buyer's name has not been published.
Individual evidence
- ^ Joachim Pissarro: Camille Pissarro. (= Rizzoli Art Series) HN Abrams, New York 1992, ISBN 0-8109-3724-7 , p. 163.
- ^ Richard Brettell: Pissarro's People. Prestel, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-7913-5118-6 , pp. 172ff.
- ↑ Internet site of the Christie's auction house