April, Epping. Lucien Pissarro (1863-1944). 1894. Oil on canvas. 603 x 730 mm. Collection: Tate. Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1934, N04747. Kindly made available on the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (CC BY-NC-ND).
David Fraser Jenkins writes, in the Tate's entry for this painting,
In this view of Epping, Pissarro stood with his back to the sun facing a field, a row of trees, and some houses along a road in the clear sunlight of a spring day. He covers the expanse of the foreground with ordered, criss-crossed touches of paint, mostly light green but with a variety of other colours, showing recession by means of colour. In the left corner the shadow of a large tree falls across the field; it is painted with orange, mauve and blue touches among the green of the meadow, so allowing Pissarro to demonstrate a key principle of impressionism: that shadows are coloured. At the centre of the composition a woman dressed in a black cloak walks just behind the line of trees. Four of the houses at the right have long kitchen gardens. The painting is a recreation of a sunlit landscape, but it also emphasises the village economy of the tended gardens.
Everything here is neat, including the way the trees grow as they descend the slope in front of the houses. Their branches seem to engage in a graceful dance. The natural landscape and the built environment harmonise beautifully. Despite the pattern of blue shadows in the foreground, the predominant sense is of the grass springing to life after winter, the leaves tentatively displaying their first tints (as Robert Frost says in "Nothing Gold Can Stay": "Nature's first green is gold"), and the sky over all, pale but shimmering. — Jacqueline Banerjee
Bibliography
Baron, Wendy. "Pissarro, Lucien Camille (1863–1944), artist and printer." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Web. 11 August 2020.
Jenkins, David Fraser. Catalogue Entry for April, Epping (part of "The Camden Town Group in Context" project). Tate. Web. 11 August 2020.
"Lucien Pissarro (1863-1944)." Stern Pissarro Gallery. Web. 11 August 2020.
Created 8 August 2020