 |
| Camille Pissarro Two Young Peasant Women 1891-92 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
"Camille Pissarro's Two Young Peasant Women was first shown to the public in late January 1892. It was part of a wide-ranging exhibition of Pissarro's past and recent work – the kind we would now call a retrospective – put on at the Durand-Ruel Gallery, in a fashionable shopping street just off the boulevard des Italiens. The catalogue for the show invited the visitor to look at Pissarro's paintings chronologically, or with a sense of how paintings done in the previous few months matched up to those from ten or twenty years earlier. There were fifty oil paintings and a score of gouaches: eleven oils from the 1870s, and a hard core of twenty or so landscapes and peasant figures from the great years 1881 and 1883. The year of each cluster of pictures was set off in the catalogue in bold capitals."
"All of this had something of a new-fangled flavor in 1892. One or two critics of the exhibition managed the word "retrospective," but never as a noun. Pissarro himself, writing to Monet a fortnight before the opening, opted for the slightly bemused, or maybe even apologetic, formula, "a more or less general exhibition of my works." Thinking of pictures as primarily episodes in an individual's career – as opposed to, say, contributions to a public dialogue in the Salon, or responses to moments like Vendémiaire Year 2 – was to become natural to modernism in the years that followed. The retrospective is one of modernism's main language-games. It teaches artists to view their work, proleptically, as part of a singular, continuous past; and therefore to produce work to fill the bill. I am not saying that these habits of mind were non-existent in 1892 – if only the history of bourgeois individualism were divisible into such neat "befores" and "afters"! – but it does matter, to modernism and to Pissarro, that they were still a bit foreign and fragile."
 |
| Camille Pissarro Conversation ca. 1881 oil on canvas National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo |
 |
| Camille Pissarro Peasant Women Minding Cows 1882 canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
"So peasant life was a screen, then, on which modernism projected its technical and expressive wishes? Well, yes. But this does not mean the screen was empty, or the projections made out of nothing. There was a form of life still actually existing in the nineteenth century (I know the word "peasant" sums it up too neatly) that stood in the way of modernity, and resisted the disenchantment of the world. Modernist values partly depended on an image of that life and its characteristic qualities. No doubt in the imagining process the qualities were idealized, or prettified, or sentimentalized. But those words are not final pejoratives. They may only describe the agony – the inevitable ruthlessness – involved in keeping a dream of humanity alive."
 |
| Camille Pissarro Apple Picking, or, The Apple Eaters 1886 oil on canvas Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan |
 |
| Camille Pissarro Washerwoman (Study) 1880 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
 |
| Camille Pissarro Poultry Market at Gisors 1885 tempera and pastel on paper, mounted on panel Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
 |
| Camille Pissarro The Harvest 1882 oil on canvas Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo |
 |
| Camille Pissarro La Récolte des Foins, Éragny 1887 canvas Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam |
"Maybe the problem is not prettiness in itself. Prettiness has to be admitted. Not to do so is not to admit the grounds – or one of the grounds – of one's interest in the subject of peasant women. (In the letter where Pissarro says his peasant women in general are too pretty, the whole thought is that they regularly start off that way, and only become beautiful – that is, part of the picture's beauty – through repeated work.) The downtrodden field-women of Millet, or the Joan-of-Arcs-in-the-making of Jules Breton, are far deadlier fictions of labor and the female body than the one Two Young Peasant Women tries to resuscitate. Anti-pastoral was by Pissarro's time (and long, long before) as much of a cliché as pastoral, and more smug in its Realist certainties."
 |
| Camille Pissarro Two Peasant Women in a Meadow 1893 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
 |
| Camille Pissarro Le Jardin de Maubuisson, Pontoise - La Mère Bellette 1882 canvas private collection |
 |
| Camille Pissarro Washerwoman at Éragny 1893 canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
 |
| Camille Pissarro Hay Harvest at Éragny 1901 oil on canvas National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa |
 |
| Camille Pissarro Haymakers Resting 1891 oil on canvas McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas |
 |
| Camille Pissarro Woman with Green Scarf 1893 oil on canvas Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
– quoted passages are from the Pissarro chapter in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism by T.J. Clark (Yale University Press, 1999)