Camille Pissarro, The “Royal Palace” at the Hermitage, Pontoise

0:00:04.7 Dr. Beth Harris: We’re standing in the galleries at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and we’re looking at a painting by Camille Pissarro, maybe the most consistent of the Impressionists. He exhibited all eight Impressionist exhibitions and was very dedicated to the Impressionist movement. We’re looking at a painting of Pontoise, which is a kind of suburb north of Paris.

0:00:27.9 Dr. Sylvain Cordier: It is considered the suburb of Paris, but it’s quite far. It’s in the northwest, so it’s extremely rural. It’s not a village where he would consistently live. He also moved back to Paris, moved away, but there’s definitely an attachment on his part to the little town of Pontoise, and in particular to that place L’Hermitage, the Hermitage, which is a sort of little neighborhood.

0:00:50.7 Dr. Beth Harris: And in that way that we expect of Impressionist paintings, we have Pissarro attempting to capture the light, the season of the year, clearly winter, the shadows are long, the trees which take up so much of the canvas emphasizing the bareness of the winter time.

0:01:10.2 Dr. Sylvain Cordier: The large area of white that we see in the center is probably wall leading to another property, and the large wall that’s on the left is supposedly the family house. The house is extremely modest, however, probably as a joke within the family, they would nickname it the royal palace, the palais royale.

0:01:29.0 Dr. Beth Harris: I’m thinking about how important landscape becomes as the 19th century progresses, the importance of painting the French countryside.

0:01:39.3 Dr. Sylvain Cordier: Here, what I find really interesting is the fact that the landscape itself appears as almost hidden by this fascinating grid-like forefront that is composed by those winter trees.

0:01:53.2 Dr. Beth Harris: And normally, artists are composing very differently. We usually see a clear movement back into space and trees that frame the composition. And here we have the very opposite.

0:02:05.5 Dr. Sylvain Cordier: And we’re also seeing something completely different from a lot of what his fellow Impressionist companions would do, if we think of Monet, if we think of Sisley, and that is almost the idea that you’re deprived of a direct access or a direct understanding of the landscape. The landscape is there, but it’s hidden, and it’s not the only example of experimentations and paintings that Pissarro does in Pontoise in that moment where you can really see that.

0:02:34.0 Dr. Beth Harris: Well, it was so important in the history of landscape painting for the painter to guide your eyes through the space and to use alternating planes of light and dark to allow you to travel from foreground to middle ground to background, and that’s precisely what Pissarro is so adamantly refusing here. There’s something very mundane, something very not pretty.

0:02:58.7 Dr. Sylvain Cordier: Before being a landscape, this painting is above all an encounter. Something we haven’t mentioned yet, is the fact that on the path that we imagine the artist is taking, we have this dual, which Pissarro really wants us to see, it’s the idea that at the center of the experience of nature, of the experience of the town, there is the human figure.

0:03:20.7 Dr. Beth Harris: And that does bring to mind Pissarro’s politics, which were very important to him. Pissarro was increasingly interested in the anarchist movement and invested in this idea of rural communities, of the importance of work, painting en plein air, painting outdoors, quickly, rapidly, with different kinds of strokes of paint. Sometimes the brush work is just touches of paint, sometimes it feels thinner and pulled in different directions, sometimes it’s really thick.

0:03:54.9 Dr. Sylvain Cordier: It’s unquestionably true that the idea of a painting like this is to turn the immediate experience of an encounter into a quick immediate rendering. It’s not like the sense of academic monumentality or history painting or focusing on the subject of a painting. It’s more the feeling of the land and feeling what it means to be a modest man in the center of a modest town encountering modest people and interpreting it and looking at it from a political ideological perspective.

This work at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Impressionism: Art and Modernity on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Richard R. Brettell, Pissarro and Pontoise: The Painter in a Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

Karen Levitov and Richard Shiff, Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country (New York: The Jewish Museum, 2007).

Impressionism, an introduction

Impressionism: painting modern life