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The old market at Rouen

Camille Pissarro • Painting, 1898, 81.3×65.1 cm
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About the artwork
Art form: Painting
Subject and objects: Landscape, Urban landscape
Style of art: Impressionism
Technique: Oil
Materials: Canvas
Date of creation: 1898
Size: 81.3×65.1 cm
Artwork in selections: 32 selections

Description of the artwork «The old market at Rouen»

Pissarro already came to this city three times, he knew it perfectly and seemed to have studied all the motives and attractive places. But going with an easel to Rouen after Monet was an enviable courage and professional audacity. Camille Pissarro understood that everyone who’d see his Rouen canvases in Paris would remember the famous series by Monet, which had been successfully sold several years ago directly from the exhibition in the gallery of Paul Durand-Ruel. This meant that he had to approach the Rouen Cathedral from a completely different direction, but not pretend at the same time as if the cathedral did not exist at all.

Then Camille Pissarro hid the grandiose, ancient show place, persistently attractive for the visiting artist, behind simple city buildings. They are not so majestic and sacred, not so important. He imagined that he had been walking past this cathedral all his life, as if he grew up and grew old in Rouen.

From this vantage point, Pissarro painted three paintings in Rouen. Only this one is part of a museum exposition, the other two are in private collections (1, 2). The artist wrote to his son from Rouen that he had found a wonderful place from which he could paint not only the street, but also the market. Pissarro waited for Friday, when the working day began at the city market. This is Pissarro’s “window period”, when he could not go to the open air due to his progressive eye disease. In the last few years of his life, he just stared out the window and enjoyed the opportunity to change these windows and the view behind them sometimes — Pissarro finally got money to travel.

This integral painting with compressed space contains two areas completely different in technical execution. One is the cathedral, indistinct, flowing and ghostly in the air. Classic Impressionism, a curtsey towards youthful finds. The second area is the world of the market, noisy and bright, steady and filled with weight and volume in the sunlight. A few spots of pure colour on the visor and on the rooftops right along Rue de L'Epicerie take Pissarro away from the shimmering walls of the cathedral. In this Rouen market, some critics see a geometric harmony that heralds an early and persistent change in the pictorial philosophy, namely Cubism.
Pissarro returned to Paris, and Paul Durand-Ruel immediately bought his painting depicting a view of the Rouen market for fifteen hundred francs.

Written by Anna Sidelnikova
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