Details

Object type

painting

Title

The Banks of the Marne

Artist/Maker

Camille Jacob Pissarro artist

Culture/School

French

Date

1864

Materials

oil on canvas

Dimensions

unframed: 819 x 1079 mm; framed: 1060 x 1315 mm

Description

Camille Pissarro is revered as one of the major figures of Impressionism. Pissarro, like one of his older contemporaries, Courbet, firmly believed that the artist's role was to paint subjects drawn from everyday life. Throughout his career Pissarro was devoted to landscape, and his rural scenes and portrayals of peasant life show his interest in an unsentimental observation of nature.

Despite the fact that his technique tended towards a lesser degree of finish than that expected by the academically biased jury, his compositions were largely conservative in their careful delineation of a dark foreground- with peasant figures as staffage, adding a touch of movement and suggesting scale- to a lighter middle ground and a calm horizon.

It is possible that this work was shown at the Salon of 1864 bearing the title The Banks of the Marne. Certainly the scale of the painting suggests that it was work planned for the Salon.

Credit Line/Donor

Presented by the Trustees of the Hamilton Bequest, 1951

ID Number

2934

Location

Kelvingrove French Art Gallery