Canards sur l'étang de Montfoucault

Canards sur l'étang de Montfoucault belongs to a period in Pissarro's oeuvre of intensive experimentation with peasant life and rural imagery. Pissarro had visited Montfoucault, where his close friend Ludovic Piette had a property, on six separate occasions between 1864 and 1876, but it was the lengthy trips of 1874, 1875 and 1876, to stay with Piette, which were to have such an influence on Pissarro's style. 'By the late spring of 1874, Pissarro had altered his palette, his facture, his iconography, and his attitude toward pictorial space to form a new style almost at odds with that of the classic Pontoise period' (R. Brettell, Pissarro and Pontoise: The Painter in a Landscape, London, 1990, p. 162). The rural landscape of Montfoucault, in the Mayenne, on the edge of Normandy and Brittany, was very different from that of the modernized countryside of Pontoise. Piette's small isolated farm with its own enclosed fields and the nearby pond, gave a structure to the rural imagery Pissarro began to paint which encouraged new departures in the artist's approach and technique. 'Pissarro's facture became more dense and his brushstrokes broader. His attention turned from distantly viewed landscapes to the concentrated space of the barnyard and the sheer physicality of form - its weight, mass and proximity - became Pissarro's overriding concern in the Montfoucault period and that reality was expressed by the material presence of paint itself. Pissarro layered paint on the surface to suggest mass and weight in a manner matched in the period only by Cézanne' (R. Bretell, Pissarro and Pontoise, The Painter in a Landscape, London, 1990, p. 165).