Hampton Court Green

Hampton Court Green at the National Gallery of Art, painted during Pissarro's 1891 visit to London, belongs to the group of English park studies he produced on his periodic visits to Britain — visits motivated partly by business (building collector relationships through Durand-Ruel's London operations) and partly by the genuine pictorial interest that English subjects offered a painter accustomed to the Norman countryside. Hampton Court's park, with its formal avenue planting, its ancient chestnut trees, and its open summer green, offered a very different landscape type from his usual French subjects: more manicured, more aristocratic in its associations, yet equally susceptible to the Impressionist treatment of light through foliage and on open ground. The NGA's holding of this Hampton Court study places it alongside the French landscapes that constitute the bulk of his representation in that collection, allowing the English painting's specific differences of mood and palette to be appreciated against his more habitual French subjects.

The green's open expanse is handled in pale, high-key tones — summer grass in full sun, the sky a clear blue — with the dark avenues of trees providing structural vertical recession on either side. Pissarro uses a lighter, more aerated touch than in his French landscapes, perhaps responding to the different quality of English summer light. Figures on the green are abbreviated to small colour marks.