Paul-Émile PISSARRO

(Eragny 1884 - Clécy 1972)

Study of Willow Trees

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Watercolour, over a pencil underdrawing.
Signed and dated Paulémile Pissarro. 1926. at the lower left.
Inscribed Saules à Lyons on the verso.
482 x 320 mm. (19 x 12 5/8 in.)
As noted by the artist on the verso. this watercolour was drawn in 1926 at Lyons-la-Fôret in Upper Normandy, where Paul-Émile Pissarro had settled two years previously. The present sheet shows the particular influence of Paul Cézanne on the young Pissarro. The younger artist met Cézanne several times in Paris, and he would have also known the master’s work well from the paintings which hung in the Pissarro home in Eragny. Cézanne’s influence on the young Pissarro’s work is evident in the overall tonality of many of his paintings and watercolours, as well as his preference for a palette knife over a paintbrush in later years.









The fifth and final child of Camille Pissarro and Julie Vellay, Paul-Émile (or Paulémile, as he preferred to sign his work) Pissarro was nineteen years old when his father died in 1903. As a young boy he had accompanied his father on painting trips, and after his death took painting lessons with his godfather, Claude Monet, with whom he was to remain close. Although he exhibited a landscape painting at the Salon des Indépendants in 1905, he initially felt unable to support himself as an artist, and in 1908 reluctantly began training to become a car mechanic, and later worked as a designer of textiles and lace. The sale of some of his watercolours, however, encouraged him to devote himself to painting full time.



By the 1920’s he was sharing a studio with Kees van Dongen in Paris, and spending the summer months travelling with van Dongen, Raoul Dufy and Maurice de Vlaminck. A gifted landscape painter, Paul-Émile also experimented with printmaking, producing a number of wood engravings and etchings. He exhibited frequently at the Salon des Indépendants, the Salon des Tuileries and the Salon d’Automne. With the support of his brother Lucien, who lived in London, he also showed his work at the New English Art Club, the Baillie Gallery and the Allied Artists Association. In 1924 he settled in Lyons-la-Fôret, a small town near his birthplace of Eragny-sur-Epte, where he painted the landscape around the Epte river. In 1935 he moved to Clécy, a village on the river Orne in the Calvados region of northwest France, where he remained until his death. The success of his first one-man exhibition in America, at the Wally Findlay Galleries in New York in 1967, provided the artist with considerable recognition and financial rewards in the later years of his career.

Paul-Émile PISSARRO

Study of Willow Trees