Paysanne sous un Arbre (Peasant Woman under a Tree)
Ca. 1895
Delteil 195 (?)
Final state
Relief print on zinc plate
5 1/2 x 4 13/16 in. (14.0 x 12.3 cm)
Price upon request
A superb, richly inked, posthumous impression on wove paper with the artist's ink stamp (Lugt 613e). Full margins. Lifetime and posthumous impressions of this plate are extremely rare. The zinc plate is in the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
Reminiscent of a woodcut, this plate is one of Pissarro's only two or three known relief prints. Ceaselessly experimental with his printmaking, Pissarro revisited an ancient technique to achieve a uniquely personal result by substituting a plate of metal for a block of wood. The relief prints may have been executed in 1895 when Pissarro collaborated with his son Lucien on Travaux des champs, a series of woodcuts engraved and printed by Lucien based on drawings by his father.
This plate may be one of two relief prints that Jean Cailac discovered at Pissarro's studio sale of 1928. The two plates were not known to Loÿs Delteil and Cailac added them in the revision of Delteil's catalogue under the numbers 195 and 196. The subject of our impression suggests that it could be from plate 195, which is not reproduced in the catalogue but is described and is titled Paysanne sous un Arbre (Peasant Woman under a Tree). But the dimensions of our impression (14.0 x 12.3 cm) don't match the dimensions of the plate described by Cailac (18.7 x 12.2 cm). Had Cailac indicated erroneous dimensions? Or did Pissarro execute another relief print on the same subject?
Literature:
L. Delteil, J. Cailac, A. Hyman, 'Camille Pissarro, L’Oeuvre Gravé et Lithographié, The Etchings and Lithographs, Catalogue Raisonné', San Francisco, 1999.
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