Lot Essay
Pissarro painted the luminous Les Coteaux de Thierceville in mid-1884, during the first summer he spent in his new home in Éragny. The artist had been living in Osny, near Pontoise, for the previous two years, but the growing size of his family--he had four young children living at home, with another due in August--required that he find a larger house. Pontoise, where the artist had worked extensively during the 1870s and the early 1880s, had become too expensive. Other locales lacked interest as subjects for his landscape paintings, or were simply too bourgeois and developed for his liking. He wrote to his son Lucien on 1 March 1884: "We've made up our minds on Éragny-sur-Epte. The house is superb and inexpensive: a thousand francs, with garden and meadow. It's two hours from Paris. I found the region much more beautiful than Compiègne" (Letters, vol. 1, no. 222). The Pissarro family moved to Éragny in early April. They rented the two-storied farmhouse, which still exists today at 29, rue Camille-Pissarro, for the next eight years, and then finally purchased it in 1892 with the aid of a loan from Claude Monet. On 9 April, Pissarro wrote to his dealer Durand-Ruel: "I haven't been able to resist painting, so beautiful are the views all around my garden. So I began work yesterday, eager to resume my daily routine" (Letters, vol. 1, no. 231).
Éragny, situated in the Vexin, the region bordering Normandy northwest of Paris, was a small village of fewer than 500 inhabitants. Nearby Gisors was a more sizable town and had a lively market. Beyond the field adjacent to his home, and across a bridge over the river Epte, lay the village of Bazincourt, whose tall church steeple became a frequent motif in Pissarro's Éragny landscapes. Thierceville is a small hamlet near Bazincourt. Using his ingenious rolling easel as he moved in ever-widening circles from his home, Pissarro looked from his vantage point on a cavée, a country lane, down the side of a knoll towards the houses in Thierceville, and across the fields to the hills beyond. He painted the hills near Thierceville on only one other occasion (see J. Pissarro and C. Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, no. 859). Here Pissarro leads the viewer's eye along an oblique descending line, marked by the tops of the trees in the foreground, across alternating strata of green open fields and bordering mauve-toned wooded areas; the receding landscape then rises beyond the village to a high and distant horizon line set against a hazy summer sky. Pissarro worked up a richly textured surface to render the dappled foliage, and used small, comma-like brushstrokes and a high-keyed, light-drenched palette to capture the atmospheric effect of shimmering midday summer heat.
Les Coteaux de Thierceville initially came to America early in its life--its first private owner was Charles Tyson Yerkes (1837-1905), one of the most infamous "Robber Barons" of late 19th century American capitalism, who purchased the painting from Durand-Ruel in 1891. Yerkes opened his own brokerage firm at the age of 23 in Philadelphia, the city of his birth. He lost his first fortune in the collapse of the national bond market in 1871, and then served prison time for bribing local officials and embezzlement. Following his pardon he returned to banking and focused his interests on railways and urban transit. In 1881 he relocated to Chicago, where he bought up streetcar lines and built the elevated railways which today serve the famous Loop in downtown Chicago. To polish his public image, he financed the Yerkes Observatory for the University of Chicago. He later became involved in the construction of the London Underground, and spent his final years in New York. Yerkes' business practices were often ruthless and unscrupulous; such was his reputation that the crusading novelist Theodore Dreiser based on him the character of the financier Frank Cowperwood in his series The Trilogy of Desire. Durand-Ruel bought back Les Coteaux de Thierceville following the legal settlement of Yerkes' estate in 1911 and subsequently resold it in Europe. The picture traveled again to America following its acquisition in 1965 by Wildenstein, who sold it to the present owner the following year.
Éragny, situated in the Vexin, the region bordering Normandy northwest of Paris, was a small village of fewer than 500 inhabitants. Nearby Gisors was a more sizable town and had a lively market. Beyond the field adjacent to his home, and across a bridge over the river Epte, lay the village of Bazincourt, whose tall church steeple became a frequent motif in Pissarro's Éragny landscapes. Thierceville is a small hamlet near Bazincourt. Using his ingenious rolling easel as he moved in ever-widening circles from his home, Pissarro looked from his vantage point on a cavée, a country lane, down the side of a knoll towards the houses in Thierceville, and across the fields to the hills beyond. He painted the hills near Thierceville on only one other occasion (see J. Pissarro and C. Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, no. 859). Here Pissarro leads the viewer's eye along an oblique descending line, marked by the tops of the trees in the foreground, across alternating strata of green open fields and bordering mauve-toned wooded areas; the receding landscape then rises beyond the village to a high and distant horizon line set against a hazy summer sky. Pissarro worked up a richly textured surface to render the dappled foliage, and used small, comma-like brushstrokes and a high-keyed, light-drenched palette to capture the atmospheric effect of shimmering midday summer heat.
Les Coteaux de Thierceville initially came to America early in its life--its first private owner was Charles Tyson Yerkes (1837-1905), one of the most infamous "Robber Barons" of late 19th century American capitalism, who purchased the painting from Durand-Ruel in 1891. Yerkes opened his own brokerage firm at the age of 23 in Philadelphia, the city of his birth. He lost his first fortune in the collapse of the national bond market in 1871, and then served prison time for bribing local officials and embezzlement. Following his pardon he returned to banking and focused his interests on railways and urban transit. In 1881 he relocated to Chicago, where he bought up streetcar lines and built the elevated railways which today serve the famous Loop in downtown Chicago. To polish his public image, he financed the Yerkes Observatory for the University of Chicago. He later became involved in the construction of the London Underground, and spent his final years in New York. Yerkes' business practices were often ruthless and unscrupulous; such was his reputation that the crusading novelist Theodore Dreiser based on him the character of the financier Frank Cowperwood in his series The Trilogy of Desire. Durand-Ruel bought back Les Coteaux de Thierceville following the legal settlement of Yerkes' estate in 1911 and subsequently resold it in Europe. The picture traveled again to America following its acquisition in 1965 by Wildenstein, who sold it to the present owner the following year.