BG 87

 

CAMILLE PISSARRO

Saint Thomas 1830 - 1903 Paris

 

Le Quai Malaquais et l’Institut de France

 

Signed and dated lower right: C. Pissarro. 1903

Canvas: 21 3/8 x 25 5/8 in / 54.4 x 65 cm

Frame size: 32 x 36 ½ in / 81.3 x 92.7 cm

 

Provenance:

Georges Manzana-Pissarro, Les Andelys and Paris, by descent from the artist in 1904

Bernheim-Jeune, Paris

Paul Cassirer, Berlin, bought from the above on 30^th March 1907; sold the same day to

Mr and Mrs Samuel Fischer, Berlin-Grünewald;

Brigitte and Gottfried Bermann Fischer, Vienna, 1936, from whom confiscated by the National Socialists in March 1938;

Sale, Dorotheum, Vienna, 20th-22nd May 1940, lot 339, as ‘Pariser Boulevard by Paul Emile Pissarro’

Eugen Primavesi, Vienna, acquired at the above sale for Hans W Lange, Berlin

Bruno Lohse, Munich; gift to Schönart Anstalt, Vaduz, in 1978;

Schönart Anstalt, Vaduz, 1978-2008;

returned to Gisela Bermann Fischer, 2008

 

Exhibited:

Lucerne, Kunstmuseum Lucerne, Eröffnungs-Ausstellung, December 1933-March 1934, no.312

Lausanne, Fondation de l’Hermitage, L’impressionisme dans les collections Romandes, June-October 1984, no. 65, illus. p.165

 

Literature:

LR Pissarro and L Venturi, Camille Pissarro, son art-son oeuvre, Paris 1938, vol. 1, p.260, no. 1290 (illus. vol. II, pl.251; titled Quai Malaquais, printemps)

D Pataky, Pissarro, Budapest 1972, pl.50

J Pissarro and C Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro, Catalogue critique des peintures, Paris 2005, vol.III, no.1492 (illus. p.903; catalogued as ‘current location unknown’)

L Müller, ‘Zürich, Bahnhofstrasse, Kantonalbank, Safe nr.5’, Cash, 3rd May 2007, illus.

S Koldehoff, ‘Pissarro Lost and Found’, Art News, Summer 2007, pp.76-80; illus. p.76

M Boehm, ‘Prof ensnared in case of Pissarro looted by Nazis’, Los Angeles Times, 15^th April 2008, illus.

 

 

Painted in 1903, Le Quai Malaquais et l’Institut forms a part of Camille Pissarro’s fourth and final series of views of Paris. This picture dates from what was to be Pissarro’s last period painting in the French capital; although he returned to Paris shortly before his death in November 1903, it was during this earlier stay (November 1902 to May 1903) that he created his final views of the city.

 

Pissarro had painted some cityscapes earlier in his career, but it was only in 1893 that he had first tackled the subject of Paris, the bustling cosmopolitan hub of France. Once he started, he returned several times to the city, specifically renting apartments for their vistas. Le Quai Malaquais et l’Institut was painted from a hotel room at 19 quai Voltaire, which Pissarro rented from late March to late May 1903, to vary the  views which he had painted from his apartment at 28 Place Dauphine. On 30^th March he wrote with delight to his son Lucien in London of his new ‘series of canvases [showing] the Pont Royal and the Pont du Carrousel, as well as the houses strung out along the quai Malaquais, with the Institut [de France] and, to the left, the retreating banks of the Seine, motifs where the light is magnificent’ (quoted in J Pissarro and C Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, op.cit., p.894).

 

Pissarro’s late series of cityscapes are extraordinarily subtle, humane and responsive to changing atmosphere. In this painting he conveys the grandeur of the city’s architecture, the lives it enfolds and the softening qualities of nature even in this great metropolis: tender leaves in the trees on the quai; the glinting river; the overcast but infinitely varied sky. Like Monet, Pissarro was happy to paint the same motif again and again, because the same view offered a ceaseless transformation of light and atmosphere. ‘When I start off a painting, the first thing I strive to catch is its harmonic form [l’accord]’ he commented. ‘Between that sky and that ground and that water there is necessarily a link. It can only be a set of harmonies [relations d’accords]’[1]. The harmonies of this painting are the exquisite grey-blue, buff, lilac, sage green and soft browns of a cloudy day.

 

Pissarro worked in front of his motif, changing canvases with the changing weather. As Joachim Pissarro comments: ‘This continuous struggle with the unpredictable demanded agility from the painter: he had to be ready to capture with great speed whatever effect presented itself….It is quite extraordinary that in 1902, a year before his death, the total output of [Pissarro’s] work was the same as in 1872, his most productive year to date. He had developed techniques that enabled him to paint with a renewed vitality and an extreme fluidity of action’[2].

 

Pissarro’s final series of Paris views comprises fourteen[3] paintings, five of which (including the present work)[4] show the distinctive dome of the Institut de France at the end of the Pont des Arts. The great scholar of Impressionism John Rewald should have the last word: ‘Many of his last pictures are among the finest Pissarro created, making a worthy finale to his long and varied career. Nothing betrays his age and his suffering, nor the need and scorn he had known for several decades. If anything, his love for nature, his capacity for emotion, and his technical proficiency seem to have increased with the years; everything is fresh, painted so originally and felt with such enthusiasm, such optimism, and youthfulness that it inspires veneration’[5].

 

 

Note on provenance

 

This painting was inherited by Pissarro’s son Georges in 1904 and sold in 1907 to Samuel Fischer, a Berlin publisher and founder of Fischer Verlag. It was inherited by his daughter Brigitte and son-in-law Gottfried Bermann. After they fled Vienna for the United States, the Pissarro was confiscated by the Nazis in March 1938 and sold at the Dorotheum in 1940. It passed through the hands of the notorious art dealer Dr Bruno Lohse (d.2007), who helped to build Hermann Goering’s collection. Missing for decades, Pissarro’s Le Quai Malaquais et l’Institut was tracked down to a Zurich bank vault in 2007 by Brigitte and Gottfried’s daughter, Gisela Bermann Fischer. It was returned to the heirs of the Fischer estate.

 

  Camille Pissarro, Le Quai Malaquais et l’Institut, printemps, soleil, signed and dated 1903. Hermitage, St Petersburg, inv. no.3KP 531.

 

 

CAMILLE PISSARRO

Saint Thomas 1830 - 1903 Paris

 

Camille Pissarro was perhaps the greatest propagandist and the most constant member of the Impressionists and the only one to participate in all eight of their exhibitions.

 

Born at St Thomas in the West Indies, he went to school in Paris and then worked in his father's business for five years. Ill suited to being a merchant, Pissarro decided to become a painter, studying at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the informal Académie Suisse. He was considerably influenced and encouraged by Corot and to a lesser extent by Courbet.

 

During the 1860s, he exhibited at the official Salons and in 1863, at the Salon des Refusés. He increasingly associated himself with the Impressionists, especially Monet and Renoir, and with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war fled to London, where Durand-Ruel became his principal patron and dealer.

 

After the war, Pissarro returned to France and settled at Pontoise, spending much time with Cezanne, whom he directed towards Impressionism. In 1884 he moved to Eragny and during the 1890s the meadows at Eragny-sur-Epte, looking across to the village of Bazincourt, became one of Pissarro's principal subjects, painted at different times of the day and year.

 

In 1885, he came into contact with Seurat and Signac and for a brief period experimented with Neo-Impressionism. The rigidity of this technique, however, proved too restrictive and he returned to the freedom and spontaneity of Impressionism.

 

From 1893 Pissarro embarked upon a series of Parisian themes such as the Gare St Lazare and the Grands Boulevards. He continued to spend the summers at Eragny, where he painted the landscape in his most poetic Impressionist idiom.