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Camille Pissarro (artist) French, 1830 - 1903 Peasant Girl with a Straw Hat, 1881 oil on canvas Overall: 73.4 x 59.6 cm (28 7/8 x 23 7/16 in.) framed: 90.2 x 75.9 x 7 cm (35 1/2 x 29 7/8 x 2 3/4 in.) Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection 1970.17.52 |
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While many impressionists painted middle-class Parisians enjoying country outings, Pissarro staffed his landscapes with peasants at work on the land. He painted rustic men and women, not to sentimentalize them, as some had done, but because he saw in their labors an honest life, free of the artificial strictures of the urban bourgeoisie. In Pissarro’s early landscapes, these peasants are usually small, anonymous figures, but in the 1880s they become larger and individualized, no longer at work but pensive and meditative.
In places, the heavily worked surface seems almost stuccoed with paint. Though some of Pissarro's early landscapes were worked quickly on the spot, he later worked more slowly, with painstaking work in the studio. Pissarro was interested in optics. His understanding of local color and how it is modified by reflected light can be seen in the shadows—green under her chin, purple by the cord of her hat. This interest led him to experiment briefly with pointillism, but he soon rejected its contrived formulas, preferring the freedom and freshness of impressionism.
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