A sun-drenched, verdant panorama opens before the viewer’s eyes, framed by two grass slopes in the foreground. A narrow lane curves down towards the green fields. A woman in a dark dress is sitting by the roadside, looking up at a standing man.
From the thick hedge behind the woman some bare tree branches twist rhythmically upwards at the right-hand edge of the image. The steep grassy slope to the left forms a diagonal through the image. At the bottom of the incline runs a small river, a horizontal band cutting across the image. Beside the river is a tall, slender tree with a round crown, placed centrally in the picture as if bracing the field of view. On the far bank, fields with clearly defined patches of arable ground recede to a small village with scattered houses. A road runs in an arc across the opposite hillside, up towards the tree line on the horizon. The picture gives an impression of lush greenery on a hot summer’s day. The sunlight beats down on the open countryside and the glistening water. The viewer can identify with the couple in the shade. The man and woman are not contemplating the landscape; instead, they seem preoccupied with everyday concerns. It adds to the impression of a rural district seen in broad daylight.
Pissarro’s technique, with its thin, short brushstrokes, generates a blurred, shimmering luminosity. On closer inspection, however, a very solid pictorial space emerges. This exploration of a geometrized field of view was something Pissarro shared with his friend Cézanne.
Pissarro painted a series of landscapes in Bazincourt and the environs of Éragny in Val-d’Oise in the Île-de-France. The Musée d’Orsay in Paris has, for example, Landscape at Chaponval (1880), which he painted near Pontoise, it too a hilly landscape with figures bathed in a soft light.
Kristoffer Arvidsson from The Collection Gothenburg Museum of Art, Gothenburg 2014
