Lucien Pissarro

(British, 1863-1944)

A Lane in Snow (Crockhurst Lane) 65 x 53 cm. (25 1/2 x 20 7/8 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
With Arthur Tooth & Sons, London, 1943 (cat.no.7), where acquired by
Miss Rosemary Kerr
With Arthur Tooth & Sons, London, 1954, where acquired by
J. A. Northrop on behalf of the family of the present owner, thence by descent
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, The Galleries, Suffolk Street, Fifty-Fifth Exhibition of Modern Pictures held by the New English Art Club, Summer 1916, cat.no.29

Literature
Anne Thorold, A Catalogue of the Oil Paintings of Lucien Pissarro, Athelney, London, 1983, pp.120-121, cat.no.227 (ill.b&w)


From December of 1915 until July of the following year Lucien Pissarro stayed at Ivy Cottage in the village of Coldharbour, just south of Dorking and deep in the Surrey Hills. His first couple of months there were to be particularly wintery, with blizzards recorded across the country and snow falls of up to 14 inches. Pissarro had previously painted the effects of snow, but only infrequently. First in the winter of 1892 at Éragny, then in 1909–10 at Stamford Brook in west London. However, his fresh English country surrounds nestled under a blanket of snow were to prove an irresistible challenge and he produced four exquisite snow-scenes, including A Lane in Snow (Crockhurst Lane).

Pissarro's father Camille, the famed artist, is highly celebrated for his winter scenes. An Impressionist, varied weather conditions altering familiar views providing scope for dazzling plays of light and colour, held great allure. The young Lucien adopted many of his father's techniques and his earliest snow work of 1892 (Effet de Neige, Éragny) is handled in a manner in which the artistic lineage is palpable; the surface is highly stippled and a firmer contrast between light and shadow is employed. By the date of the present work Lucien, now in his fifties, had developed his brush stroke to a freer and confident calligraphic nature. A base layer of fluid drawing marks is apparent in the trunks and limbs of the trees on the left, contrasted with the impasto passages of snow upon the branches and covering the ground. His palette is subtle and refined; powder blue and steely grey for the shadows and highlight hues of dusty rose and soft pinks illuminate the landscape in a gentle atmospheric light.

Pissarro's paintings of snow from 1916 are deemed so successful that two of the four examples are now in public collections; Ivy Cottage (Sunset and Snow) Coldhabour in the collection of the Tate Gallery, London and The Dorking Road, Coldharbour, in Snow in the collection of the Manchester City Art Gallery. Indeed, although snow scenes by Pissarro are extremely rare (constituting less than 20 examples amongst his overall output of more than 500 paintings), a quarter of these are now museum pictures including examples belonging to the Ashmolean, Oxford, Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery and Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.

Further testament to the artist's own verdict on the success of the present composition is that he chose to return to the same scene for the picture Crockhurst Lane, Coldharbour (now in the collection of the Manchester City Art Gallery). In it he depicts the very same location with the inclusion of two distant figures winding their way up the lane. Also dating to 1916, the leaf cover to the deciduous trees is still sparse, but the verge of the lane is now lush and green suggesting a spring execution, following the present January work.