Blackpool Valley. Lucien Pissarro (1863-1944). 1913. Oil on canvas. H 54.6 x W 65.4 cm. City Arts Centre, Edinburgh. Accession number: CAC99/1964. Presented by the Scottish Modern Arts Association, 1964. Kindly made available via Art UK on the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (CC BY-NC-ND).
The Blackpool of the title is not the seaside resort in Lancashire, but a village in Devon close to Dartmouth. This was an area Pissarro enjoyed visiting. On this first occasion, in 1913, he was just getting over "an illness which had affected his lungs" (Moorby), and his daughter Orovida and friend, James Brown (a musician, who also enjoyed painting), both spent some time with him there. He made a wood-engraving of this particularly cheerful scene as well, again showing "buildings in the foreground, nestling in the valley amidst the hills and trees" (Moorby), but the painting has a vigour and dash that could not be reproduced well by exchanging quick, lively brushstrokes and a patchwork of colours for bold lines, however skilful the shading. — Jacqueline Banerjee
Bibliography
Moorby, Nicola. Catalogue entry for the wood-engraving, Landscape, c. 1911. Tate. Web. 12 August 2020. [The date of the wood-engraving is puzzling, since the visit was from mid-February-July 1913, and the painting is dated 1913.]
Created 12 August 2020