Wild Boar Fell, Brough. Lucien Pissarro (1863-1944). 1914. Oil on canvas. H 59.6 x W 75 cm. Manchester Art Gallery. Accession number: 1925.306; gift from Charles Lambert Rutherston, 1925. Kindly made available via Art UK on the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (CC BY-NC-ND).

Brough is a small town in Westmorland, now Cumbria. This is Dick Turpin country, and it is easy to imagine a highwayman roving on these undulating moors, with their few houses, stone walls and green expanses. Yet Pissarro was staying here, in Swindale Grange, Westmorland, in August 1914, at the very time when news came that Germany had invaded Belgium (see Meadmore 146). That makes the scene seem so innocent now — and worth preserving at any cost. — Jacqueline Banerjee (with thanks to Jane Chantler for correcting the location of Brough)

Bibliography

Meadmore, William Sutton. Lucien Pissarro: Un Coeur Simple. New York: Knopf, 1963.


Created 12 August 2020