Ludovic-Rodolphe Pissarro reading

Ludovic-Rodolphe Pissarro Reading of 1899 was painted at Éragny, where the artist's son was visiting or residing, and belongs to the category of family portrait that Pissarro produced with genuine warmth throughout his career. His children — seven in total, several of whom became artists — were subjects almost as frequently as the Norman peasants and Parisian street vendors that dominated his figure painting. Ludovic-Rodolphe, known as Rodo, had artistic ambitions of his own and would become a printmaker and colour engraver. The reading subject connected to the family's cultivation and intellectual interests: Pissarro senior was a voracious reader of socialist political theory — Kropotkin, Proudhon — as well as art criticism and literature, and the domestic scene of a son absorbed in a book in the garden reflects the intellectual character of the household he and Julie had established at Éragny. The painting was made in the same year that he was producing both his urban series Paris views and his rural Éragny subjects, the domestic and public poles of his late production coexisting in the same period without apparent tension.

The figure reading is caught in relaxed, absorbed concentration. Pissarro's late figure technique is confident and economical — the seated form established with broad, warm strokes of ochre and grey, the book and hands receiving particular attention as the focal subject of reading. Background garden elements are looser and more atmospheric.