Le Pont de la Clef à Bruges, Belgique
Camille Pissarro , 1903
46.4 × 55.2 cm
oil on canvas
Manchester Art Gallery
Le Pont de la Clef à Bruges, Belgique is a painting by the French painter Camille Pissarro from 1903. The picture was taken a few weeks before the artist's death and shows a cityscape with historical buildings in Bruges . It goes back to the painter's stay in the Belgian city in 1894, when he initially only recorded the scene as a drawing. The picture, which is painted oil on canvas, is 46.4 cm high and 55.2 cm wide. While Pissarro painted large parts of the picture in the style of Impressionism , there are also parts in which elements of pointillism can be recognized. The painting has been part of the Manchester Art Gallery collection since 1946.
Image description
The painting shows a view of the city of Bruges in Belgium. In the middle of the picture there is a canal bridge, the Dutch name of which was Sleutelbrug in the picture's title, which became the French variant Pont de la Clef . The Beenhouwerstraat runs over the bridge, but remains largely hidden in the picture by houses and trees. The canal and the street to its left are both called Speelmansrei . Its name was derived from the Speelmanskapel , cut off from the left edge of the picture , which was built in 1421 as the musicians' chapel. Another church building is the Sint-Jakobskerk , the tower and nave of which rise behind the bridge. To the left and right of the Sint-Jakobskerk there are some houses. Pissarro used just a few colors for the buildings. The Speelmanskapel is painted as a dark building on the edge in various gray, brown and red tones. Especially the pointed roof and the Gothic windows seem rather gloomy. As a contrast, there are two white houses with roofs made of bright red tiles to the right of the chapel. Behind the smaller of the two houses, three narrow turrets rise like fingers. The Sint-Jakobskerk in the center of the picture, with its light brick facade and light gray roof, looks considerably friendlier than the chapel on the left. Most of the other buildings in the center of the picture only show parts of the red roofs.
Photograph of the street Speelmansrei, on the right the canal of the same name, above the Sleutelbrug
Photography of the Speelmanskapel
Photography of the Sint-Jakobskerk
The right half of the picture is dominated by green vegetation. While a shallow embankment with grassy areas slopes down to the canal at the bottom right, there is a row of green leafy trees on the right edge of the picture that extend to the top of the picture. Another tree is in the center of the picture in front of the Sint-Jakobskerk. Pissarro varied the grasses and leaves in very different shades of green and levels of brightness, working with short brush dots. These spots of color can also be found in other parts of the picture. They can be seen particularly clearly on the bridge, the bank reinforcement and on the water surface of the canal. Here the influence of pointillism can be seen in the picture, which however was not consistently implemented in the picture. For example, there are no such short dabs of color in the sky, where Pissarro painted cloud formations in red, blue and white with curved brushstrokes.
Some people bring the scenery to life. Two women with white hoods and long dresses are sitting on the grass on the right. To the left, almost at the bottom of the picture, a man is walking towards the bank. The man, dressed in brown trousers and white shirt, may be carrying a bucket and is about to fetch water from the canal. Other women walk or stand on the paved bank opposite, but they can only be recognized by their wide dresses and white hoods. Faces cannot be made out in any of the people in this picture. The painting is signed and dated lower right “C.Pissarro.1903”.
About the creation of the painting
On June 24, 1894, the French President Marie François Sadi Carnot was attacked by an anarchist with a knife and died a day later of his injuries. Camille Pissarro feared reprisals from the authorities because of her own anarchist ideas and therefore went into exile for a few months. Together with his wife Julie and their son Félix Pissarro , accompanied by the Belgian painter Théo van Rysselberghe , he traveled to the medieval town of Bruges and the North Sea resort of Knokke . Only at the end of October did Pissarro return to France with his family.
Pissarro was fascinated by Bruges, as the city had largely retained its historical appearance and there was little to be seen of the influences of modernity (“tout modernisme”). In Bruges he was reminded of the surroundings of the French city of Rouen (“une campagne comme celle de Rouen”), where he had previously painted cityscapes repeatedly. The painting Le Pont de la Clef à Bruges, Belgique was not made in Bruges. On site, Pissarro first made a drawing of the motif, based on which the etching Quai des Menetriers a Bruges was created in 1894 . This title is the French version of the Dutch name Speelmansrei . Initially, the embankment gave its name, and it was not until the painting, which was made nine years later, that the bridge became the focus of the title.
Provenance
Camille Pissarro died in November 1903, a few weeks after completing the painting Le Pont de la Clef à Bruges, Belgique . The picture later passed into the possession of his son Lucien Pissarro . Like his father, he was also a painter and lived in England for several decades, where he died in 1944. His widow, Esther Levi Pissarro, donated the painting to the Manchester Art Gallery in 1946.
literature
- Ulrike Aschoff, Gerhard Finckh: Camille Pissarro, the father of impressionism . From the Heydt Museum, Wuppertal 2014, ISBN 978-3-89202-091-2 .
- Janine Bailly-Herzberg: Correspondance de Camille Pissarro . Volume III, Presses Univ. de France, Paris 1988, ISBN 2-905684-09-7 .
- Christoph Becker: Camille Pissarro . Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit 1999, ISBN 3-7757-0855-3 .
- Anne Röver: Camille Pissarro, etchings, lithographs, monotypes from German and Austrian collections . Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen 1990, DNB 910142432 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Christoph Becker: Camille Pissarro. P. 26.
- ^ Anne Röver: Camille Pissarro. P. 89.
- ↑ Janine Bailly-Herzberg: Correspondance de Camille Pissarro. Volume 3, p. 455.
- ↑ The etching is sometimes referred to as Das Musikantenufer in Bruges . See Anne Röver: Camille Pissarro. P. 89. For the painting there is the partial translation Die Pont de la Clef in Bruges, Belgium. see Ulrike Aschoff, Gerhard Finckh : Camille Pissarro, the father of impressionism. P. 301.