1866
oil
canvas
From the collection of Art Institute of Chicago
The Banks of the Marne in Winter is a 1866 oil by Camille Pissarro, a Impressionism work, held at Art Institute of Chicago.
Pissarro shows a quiet winter scene by the Marne River. Trees stand bare. The ground is muddy. The sky is heavy and gray. No bright colors here. He painted this early in his career. He chose to skip pretty scenery. Most artists showed soft, idealized landscapes. Pissarro went darker, heavier. His paint is thick in places, almost like paste. Look for thick paint called impasto. It makes the scene feel rougher. Try it yourself at the Art Institute of Chicago.
This painting of a rural winter landscape is resolutely un-picturesque. Its dark color palette is uninterrupted by any majestic natural elements, such as towering trees or a glittering pond. Even early in his career, Camille Pissarro subverted traditional landscape painting by deliberately diverging from the pastoral scenes of his mentor, Camille Corot . In this large, rectangular canvas, Pisarro applied paint heavily, often using a palette knife, in emulation of Gustave Courbet , whose work is on view nearby. Just a few years after he made this work, Pissarro adopted a more immediate…
The artist (d. 1903); by descent to his son, Paul-Émile Pissarro, Paris, 1904 [per Pissarro and Snollaerts 2005]; sold Pissarro sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, December 3, 1928, lot 27 to Jacques Dubourg, Paris, for 35,000 francs [per annotated copy of sale cat. Galerie Georges Petit 1928, copy in curatorial object file]. S.G. Archibald, Paris, by February 1930 [per Musée de l’Orangerie 1930]. Possibly Dr. Tom John Honeyman, Glasgow, after February 1930 [this and the following per S. Martin Summers, Alex Reid & Lefevre, Ltd., London, to the Art Institute of Chicago, Dec. 6, 2000,…
Paris, Palais des Champs-Élysées, Salon de 1866, May 1–June 20, 1866, cat. 1564, as Bords de la Marne en hiver. Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie, Centenaire de la naissance de Camille Pissarro, Feb.–Mar. 1930, cat. 3. Chicago, Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago, Fifth Annual Exhibition of Modern French Painting, Feb. 7–21, 1932, cat. 23. Possibly Glasgow Art Gallery, The Spirit of France: French Paintings of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, June 1943, cat. 38. London, Lefevre Gallery, French Masters, XIX and XX Century, June–July 1952, cat. 13 (ill.). New York, Wildenstein, C.…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro ( piss-AR-oh; French: ; 10 July 1830 – 13 November 1903) was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of Saint Thomas (now in the US Virgin Islands, but then in the Danish West Indies).
See the richer artist page
