- Home Lucien Pissarro NEAC 1865 -1944 ‘La Seine a Herblay’, 1924
Oil on canvas
H22 x W26cm (H21.5 x W25.5ins)
Exhibited: Sheffield, Ruskin Gallery, 1928 Birmingham, Ruskin Gallery, 1926
Literature: Letter from Lucien to Esther Pissarro, Pissarro Family Archive, Ashmolean, Oxford, 16 May 1924 Birmingham Daily Post, 1 February 1928, p8
“[Pissarro held] the exceptional position at once of an original talent, and of the pupil of
his father, the authoritative depository of a mass of inherited knowledge and experience, [he] has certainly served as a guide, or, let us say, a dictionary of theory and practice on the road we have elected to travel.” Walter Sickert, 1914
In 1904 Lucien Pissarro (1865 -1944) started exhibiting with the New English Art Club, which is where he first met Sickert. A reviewer would write of Pissarro’s work in 1912 that his landscapes ‘have nothing to distinguish them from the commonplace, except the fact that they make one want to take a walk in them – and that is everything.’ He went on to be a founder member of the Camden Town Group, and as Sickert would write in 1914, Pissarro held ‘the exceptional position at once of an original talent, and of the pupil of his father, the authoritative depository of a mass of inherited knowledge and experience, [he] has certainly served as a guide, or, let us say, a dictionary of theory and practice on the road we have elected to travel.’
La Seine A Herblay is a commune in the department of Val-d’Oise and is located 12.6 miles from the centre of Paris. Pissarro painted many scenes from various part of Seine. Emile Zola said that “Pissarro is one of the three or four true painters of this day… I have rarely encountered a technique that is so show”. It was first sold the Ruskin Gallery, Birmingham in 1928 and remained in the same family until 2008, when it was sold to our client. The painting, features in the letter from Lucien to Esther Pissarro, dated 1924 which is held in the Ashmolean Museum.
In 1904 he started exhibiting with the New English Art Club, which is where he first met Sickert. A reviewer would write of Pissarro’s work in 1912 that his landscapes ‘have nothing to distinguish them from the commonplace, except the fact that they make one want to take a walk in them – and that is everything.’