Plum Trees in Blossom, Éragny
Camille Pissarro·1894
Historical Context
Plum Trees in Blossom, Éragny at Ordrupgaard in Denmark, painted in 1894, belongs to the sustained investigation of spring blossom subjects that Pissarro had developed at Pontoise and continued with equal commitment at his new Norman home. The Ordrupgaard collection outside Copenhagen, assembled by Wilhelm Hansen in the early twentieth century and now a public museum in a villa with later modernist additions by Zaha Hadid, holds an exceptionally fine group of Pissarro's Éragny works that document his late practice in particular depth. The 1894 date places this canvas in the period of his recovery from Neo-Impressionism, when his blossom paintings achieved a new freedom and warmth after the more constrained discipline of his pointillist phase. Plum blossom, slightly darker and more intensely pink than the white of pear or apple blossom, presented specific chromatic challenges that Pissarro addressed with the directness and confidence of an artist who had painted spring orchards for two decades.
Technical Analysis
Plum blossom, slightly darker and more pink than pear or apple, requires Pissarro to distinguish between the warm white of blossom and the cool blue-white of sky behind and beyond the trees. He renders the flower clusters with rapid, clustered strokes of varied warm and cool whites and pale pinks.
Look Closer
- ◆Pissarro applies dabs of white and pale pink to build blossom mass without individual flowers.
- ◆The plum trees' dark trunks provide strong vertical accents against the pale blossom and spring sky.
- ◆The orchard floor shows bare earth with first new grass — a seasonal specificity of early spring.
- ◆Éragny's farmhouses and distant hills anchor the scene as a specific Norman locale.
