A Time and a Place: "Near Sydenham Hill" by Camille Pissarro (Kimbell Masterpiece Series)

Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists

A Time and a Place: "Near Sydenham Hill" by Camille Pissarro (Kimbell Masterpiece Series) Details

About the Author Kathleen Adler is the former director of education at the National Gallery, London, and author of numerous publications on Impressionism. Read more

Reviews

One of the wonderful things about generously endowed art museums (of which there are not very many) is that they can not only acquire great masterpieces but can also afford to produce monograph studies of their holdings. One thinks immediately of the fabulously deep-pocketed Getty and its superb series, the "Getty Museum Studies on Art," which celebrates some of the highlights of their collection. The Kimbell Art Museum was also lavishly endowed by the wealthy Fort Worth couple who created it to house what was essentially their personal collection, and they publish the "Kimbell Masterpiece Series." The most recent addition to that collection is this study of Pissarro's painting, a beautifully produced little volume of eighty pages. There are excellent reproductions (some full-page) of other of Pissarro's London paintings and comparison illustrations of pictures by Constable, Monet, and others; there are maps of the area of the painting and photographs of what the places look like today and all manner of interesting and entertaining things, and even a couple of photographs of the painting hanging in the museum. But that is actually a problem: the context in which Adler has situated the painting is simply too wide. Surely anyone sufficiently interested in Pissarro to read a book devoted to just one of his paintings does not need to be reminded of the major events of his life before he got to London in 1870--and can the author really afford to spend sixteen of her eighty pages rehearsing stuff you can get from the internet, if not from her own admirable biography of 1978 (see my review of that on this website)? Surely it is ridiculous in such a small book with such a narrow focus to include a two-page Pissarro family tree. All of this is very interesting and informative, but it's rather frustrating that it takes us until page 53 to get to a discussion of the canvas itself, which then occupies a mere six pages of text. There are so many things in those six pages that are simply mentioned in passing and that deserve, if not require, much more extensive and deep discussion--things like brushwork, composition, what Pissarro learned from Corot, the figure on the grass, the repoussoir device of the trees, iconography, etc.--that one cannot help but think of this study as a lost opportunity. It's a very nice little book, but the pity is that it could have been so much more.One quite interesting thing about the monograph is the subtle rebuke delivered to Joachim Pissarro by the title and a brief mention in the text. In the recently updated three-volume critical catalogue of the painter's oeuvre, put together by him and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Joachim Pissarro wrote: "If one were to sum up Pissarro's art in a single concept, one could say that he painted time: ordinary, everyday time, the time it takes to chat, to loaf, to pick peas in a field or harvest potatoes . . . ." I have great respect for Joachim Pissarro's scholarship, as my various reviews of his books on this website attest (see in particular my review of his "Camille Pissarro"), but, frankly, I have no idea what to make of that statement. Why is Pissarro's painting of people chatting or digging potatoes any more or less temporal than anyone else's? Of course it takes time to pick peas, but so does every other human activity you could put in a painting. And what does it mean to "paint time" anyway? (Certainly Prof. Pissarro knows his Lessing as well as the next art historian.) In any case, after quoting the sentence above, Kathleen Adler goes on to note that "not only does Pissarro paint time, he paints _place_ in all its specificity" (68), and that is a statement with which one can surely agree.A minor cavil: in a book with such generally high production values, it really shouldn't be up to a reviewer to point out that the caption to figure 28 lists four paintings illustrated, whereas the photograph has been so cropped that there are only two, with frame fragments of the other two; and that print has been dropped at the bottom of page 70, creating a gap in Adler's review of the painting's provenance and eventual acquisition by the Kimbell.

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