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CAMILLE PISSARRO
Coteaux à Pontoise
.
Etching printed in black on cream wove paper, 1873-
74. 115x158 mm; 4
5
/
8
x6
1
/
4
inches, full margins. One
of approximately only 12 lifetime impressions.Titled
and inscribed “no. 4—1er état” in pencil, lower left.
A superb, richly-inked impression of this exceedingly
scarce, early etching.
Pissarro arrived in Paris at the age of 25 and soon came
under the influence of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot,
one of the foremost French painters of his day and a
leading figure in the Barbizon school of landscape
artists. Pissarro’s arrival in Paris also coincided with the
French etching revival, which had been gaining
momentum since the 1840s and was in full swing by
the 1850s/1860s, due in large part to the Barbizon
artists, such as Corot, Jean-François Millet and Charles-
François Daubigny, as well as pre-Impressionists like
Édouard Manet and James A. M.Whistler, embracing
etching as a fine art form and producing prints for an
enthusiastically collecting market.
According to Shapiro, Pissarro, “Was received most
kindly by Corot and for the next ten years was greatly
influenced by this artist’s poetic observations of the
forests at Fontainebleau [on the outskirts of Paris].
When Pissarro exhibited at the
Salon des Refusés
in 1864
and 1865, he designated himself as ‘pupil of Corot,’ and
his first known prints made during these years were
obviously derived from Corot,” (Shapiro,
Camille
Pissarro,The Impressionist Printmaker
, Boston, 1973).
This is likely the first etching Pissarro made after his
return to France in the early 1870s following the
Franco-Prussian war, during which he had fled to
England. The several etchings (and many of the
paintings) he had produced in the 1860s and left
behind in Paris were mostly destroyed by the Prussians
who occupied his house. Pissarro settled in Pontoise, a
suburb of Paris, when he returned from England in
1871, and the locale for the landscape view in this
etching. He began working with Paul Cézanne during
the early 1870s in Pontoise, and, at the same time he
produced this etching, helped to found, along with
Edgar Degas and Claude Monet (whom he had
become friends with in England) the
Société Anonyme
des Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs
, thereby solidifying the
birth of Impressionism. Delteil 7.
[4,000/6,000]