Camille Pissarro (1830-1903)

This work will be included in the forthcoming Camille Pissarro Digital Catalogue Raisonné, currently being prepared under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc.

The daily lives of the humble, hard-working folk who inhabited rural French towns and villages had been central to Camille Pissarro’s oeuvre since the mid-1860s; the small, distant figures in his early Impressionist landscapes are often farmers, peasants, local tradesmen, and members of their families. Around 1880 Pissarro initiated an extensive campaign to record their roles in the yearly planting and harvest cycle. He concentrated on the figure close-up, front and centre, individually or in groups, as they worked or rested in the fields. Only in the present large painting and a smaller watercolour study did Pissarro feature la ronde, a joyous, impromptu circle dance - the most ancient of all communal dance forms - in which the women among the harvesters celebrate the culmination and success of their labours.

Ludovic Rodo Pissarro and Lionello Venturi ascribed both versions to circa 1884 (op. cit., 1939, nos. 1392 & 1393). As Joachim Pissarro has pointed out, however, the artist referred to this subject as an idea in progress when writing in 1892 to his son Georges about the preparatory watercolour: ‘After having searched hard and made many attempts, I have finally managed to find my composition for my female villagers’ dance: the young women turn from right to left; they extend nearly the whole height of the picture; just above their heads, groups of horses tied to the main beam of a mechanical wheat thresher also walk in a circle. The whole thing moves between the dancers’ heads. A few more male and female peasants, busy with some harvest work, complete the composition’ (quoted in J. Pissarro, op. cit., 1993, p. 190).

Adept at imparting a sense of naturally varied, rhythmic postures and activity to field-workers in his ensemble compositions, Pissarro nevertheless realized that to evoke the motion of multiple dancing figures ‘will be a time-consuming task. I do not dare yet tackle it. I will need a few studies of movement’ (ibid.). As Joachim Pissarro has noted, the artist looked to the work of his friend Degas. In this subsequent enlarged version of La Ronde, which Pissarro elected to paint not in oils but in more fluidly brushable, quick-drying gouache, the animated circle of women is viewed complete in a larger landscape, framed by huge grain stacks on both sides. Pissarro drew attention as well to the men behind the dancers, as they admire their spirited women-folk. Emphasizing the human element in this timeless harvest ritual, the artist painted over the threshing machine (‘la batterie’) - only slight traces of pentimenti remain - which he had initially carried over from the preliminary study.