Pissarro, Camille (1830-1903)
Chemin à l’Hermitage (Road to L’Hermitage)
1874
Oil on canvas, 54 x 65.5 cm
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires
Chemin à l’Hermitage is part of a group of works that Camille Pissarro painted in 1873–1874, during his stay with Paul Cézanne in Pontoise and Auvers-sur-Oise, two small towns on the outskirts of north-east Paris. These were crucial years for the development of the art of the Impressionists and for the first dissemination of their stylistic elaborations. The frequent contact between these two painters, which preceded by a short time the first Impressionist exhibition at Nadar’s studio in April 1874, is interesting precisely because it is one of the episodes that allows us to understand how this movement was not born from the reflections of a critic or from theoretical bases defined a priori. Impressionism arose from a communion of purposes and from a tireless artistic search in which daily experimentation played a fundamental role. It was from this new way of producing art that the Impressionist revolution emerged.
The close dialogue that Pissarro and Cézanne engaged in during this period is well documented, but it is surprising to see how fruitful it was and how it represented an inexhaustible source of inspiration for them. The days they spent together with the brush in their hands played a fundamental role in the production of both. Pissarro himself testifies to the importance of those years and the mutual enrichment that both artists felt that this relationship provided them. At that time he wrote: “Cézanne has endured my influence and I his.”
The Provençal painter credited him with having been able to find the energy necessary to break away from mythological themes and concentrate his attention on the observation of nature. It is not surprising then that the need to understand the making of a painting like La maison du pendu as part of this long artistic dialogue has been so strongly stressed, if one really wants to access his most intimate motivations. But the influences did not go in one direction only; the stylistic points of contact are multiplied. As Fereshteh Daftari noted, in these years “his palettes brightened and his sensitivities to light and atmosphere intensified”, before adding that this phase would lead Cézanne towards “a vision of painting that is in sync with the outside world”. Pissarro’s artistic evolution is less evident but no less radical than that of his friend, because his works encounter a true phenomenon of geometrization of forms. The artist increasingly tended to compose his paintings according to a renewed stylistic dictate, creating authentic grids of semi-urban landscapes, in which the viewer’s eye is immersed until the plots can be deciphered. It is not surprising then that at the first historic Impressionist exhibition in 1874, La maison du pendu was displayed right next to the works produced by Pissarro in the area around Pontoise.
The house on the left of the painting, hidden behind the foliage, is probably the Maison Rondest on the rue de la Côte-du-Jalet. It was one of the many properties owned by Armand Rondest, a merchant who supplied the two artists, in the area, although it is not known whether he actually lived there. The Maison Rondest was one of the places that the two painters frequented assiduously at different times of the year. While Cézanne left only one winter representation of it, Pissarro returned to the theme on at least six occasions, in five paintings and one etching (Paysanne poussant une brouette, National Museum, Stockholm; Notre maison de paysan, private collection, Switzerland; Le grand noyer, UNICEF Foundation, Cologne; L’entrée de la maison Rondest, whose current whereabouts are unknown; Le Palais Royal à l’Hermitage, sold by Sam Salz to Paul Mellon in Upperville in April 1959). Of all these paintings, it is certainly Chemin à l’Hermitage that lends itself most to comparison with Cézanne’s painting. The perspective is the same, with the house on the left somewhat hidden among the leaves of the trees, while on the left we can see the Côte des Mathurins where, in Pissarro’s painting, we can glimpse a woman’s figure. Precisely the inability to renounce the human presence in his paintings is the point on which, in some way, he would never enter into dialogue with the Provençal painter. While Cézanne dedicated himself to the search for forms that had little or nothing to do with the human figure, he made man and his physique an essential goal of his art. In flight or on the fringes of his compositions, man almost always appears in his paintings. This is the case of Chemin à l’Hermitage, although Pissarro also made the human figure the central theme of his paintings, as evidenced by another of his works, Femme aux champs (Peasant Woman), also kept at the MNBA (oil on canvas, 88 x 48 cm, inv. 2717, signed and dated: “C. Pissarro, 82”). In this painting, produced a few years after his stay in Pontoise, the artist demonstrates that he had assimilated Cézanne’s innovations to such an extent that he integrated them into his own pictorial language. He divides the painting into zones of different colours, according to a precise geometry, but he also integrates into it a peasant figure who, with the gesture of raising her arm to put on her coat, reinforces the compositional value of the surrounding landscape.
The acquisition of Femme aux champs in 1913 by the National Commission of Fine Arts predates Chemin à l’Hermitage‘s entry into Argentine public collections in 1918 by a few years. Together with two other paintings by this master, Paysage à Berneval (inv. 2718, MNBA) and Prairies du Valhermeil (inv. 2719, MNBA), it indeed bears witness to the early interest shown by Argentine institutions in Impressionist painting. (Christian Omodeo | MNBA)