Camille Pissarro | Jardin et poulailler chez Octave Mirbeau, Les Damps, 1892

Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) spent two weeks during September 1892 as the guest of the writer Octave Mirbeau and his wife Alice at their country home in Les Damps, a hamlet in the department of the Eure in northern France.

The artist eagerly anticipated the visit throughout the summer, both for the company, Mirbeau was among the most sensitive interpreters of his work and a fellow advocate of anarchist ideals, and for the splendid motifs to be found at Les Damps.

Camille Pissarro | Jardin et poulailler chez Octave Mirbeau, Les Damps, 1892 | Christie's

"And your garden? Have you spruced it up, decked it out, made it more attractive for me"?

Pissarro wrote to his friend in July.

"If time allows, I will gladly set down a memory of it on a magnificent size 30 canvas".

The grounds at Les Damps did not disappoint, and the painter was hard at work within a day of his arrival.

"I have begun four landscapes", he reported to his eldest son Lucien, "which seem to me superb in motifs and effects".

The present Jardin et poulailler -a stately size 30 canvas (28 7/8 x 36 1/4 in.), just as Pissarro had planned- depicts a luxuriant, late summer’s pageant of flowers on a corner of Mirbeau’s property near the henhouse, which is partially visible in the middle distance at the far right.

Pissarro built up the canvas from myriad tiny touches of complementary hues-green and red, blue and orange-to create a dense tapestry of color that seems to vibrate before our eyes, evoking the heady, immersive effect of the garden.

Although the chromatic scale reflects the artist’s brief phase of experimentation with divisionism in the late 1880s, the robust and varied handling surpasses any technical formula, revealing his intense, personal absorption in the landscape.

"One must be free of everything but one’s own sensations", Pissarro instructed Lucien in a letter from Les Damps (Letter no. 816).

Mirbeau was an eager participant in the great horticultural boom that swept France in the late 19th-century, when flowers became available in a far richer array of varieties than ever before.

He tended the grounds at Les Damps with care, exchanging plants and practical advice with fellow gardeners Monet and Caillebotte.

"We’ll talk gardening, as you say", he wrote to Monet at Giverny in 1890, “because as for art and literature, it’s all humbug.

There’s nothing but the earth” (quoted in Painting the Modern Garden, exh. cat., Cleveland Museum of Art, 2015, p. 54).

Although Pissarro was not the hands-on gardener that his colleagues were - his wife Julie, formerly a florist, cared for their flower beds and vegetable plots at Éragny - he found in the modern garden, with its newfound range of colors, scents, and textures, the ideal subject for his own burgeoning art of sensations. | Source: © Christie's

Camille Pissarro trascorse due settimane nel settembre del 1892 ospite dello scrittore Octave Mirbeau e di sua moglie Alice nella loro casa di campagna a Les Damps, un villaggio nel dipartimento dell'Eure, nel nord della Francia.

L'artista attese con impazienza la visita per tutta l'estate, sia per la compagnia - Mirbeau era tra gli interpreti più sensibili della sua opera e un sostenitore degli ideali anarchici - sia per gli splendidi motivi che si trovavano a Les Damps.

"E il tuo giardino? L'hai sistemato, abbellito, reso più attraente per me?", scrisse Pissarro all'amico a luglio.

"Se il tempo lo permetterà, ne fisserò volentieri il ricordo su una magnifica tela formato 30".

Il parco di Les Damps non deluse le aspettative e il pittore era già al lavoro il giorno stesso del suo arrivo.

"Ho iniziato quattro paesaggi", riferì al figlio maggiore Lucien, "che mi sembrano superbi per motivi ed effetti".