Mr. and Mrs. Ginn
This summary is taken from the auction catalog for the sale of the Ginns’ Pissarro at Christie’s catalog, May 8, 2000.
Frank Hadley Ginn was a prominent attorney and a leading figure in the cultural life of Cleveland, Ohio at the turn of the century. He became Managing Partner of Tolles, Hogsett & Ginn in 1913, a position he held until his death in 1938. His steadfast dedication to his legal work has been repeatedly attested to by those who knew him. Carter Kissell, one of his most talented protégés, remembers Mr. Ginn for his “quiet reserve [and] unlimited pool of spiritual strength.” According to Kissell, Mr. Ginn was always “kind and considerate. Only those who really knew him were aware of what an outstanding person he was, for he shunned publicity and spurred the limelight.” Frank Hadley Ginn and his wife Cornelia Root Ginn were devoted patrons of both the performing and visual arts in Cleveland. In 1910, Mr. Ginn joined a group of music lovers to sponsor the performances of visiting orchestras, and within five years, he had convinced several other members of the Cleveland community to co-found the Musical Arts Association later to become the parent of The Cleveland Orchestra. He continued to support the Musical Arts Association through his dedicated service as a Trustee on its Executive Committee from 1915 until 1937 and as Vice President from 1927 to 1938. Mr. Ginn left a lasting legacy to the citizens of Cleveland and the musicians of The Cleveland Orchestra as chair of the Building Committee for Severance Hall. He supervised the planning and construction of this beautiful symphony hall. Mr. Ginn’s legacy was recognized in the recently completed restoration of Severance Hall with the naming of the Frank Hadley Ginn Suite for the use of leadership donors and their guests. Mr. and Mrs. Ginn were as enthusiastic about collecting works of art as they were about patronizing performances of music. During the 1920s and 1930s, the couple developed a distinguished art collection, which included numerous medieval tapestries and many important examples of Impressionist paintings. Mr. Ginn and his children donated many of these works to the Cleveland Museum of Art, including the remarkable work 1889 by Paul Gauguin entitled In the Waves (Ondine) and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Mère et enfant of 1886.
Sisley
Essay from the auction catalog from the sale of the painting, May 8, 2000.
In the autumn of 1883, Alfred Sisley settled in Saint-Mammès, a village bordering both the Forest of Fountainebleau and the junction of the Seine and the Canal du Loing. While his contemporaries often ventured far from home in search of exotic landscapes, Sisley spent 1885 and 1886 exploring his favorite subjects, the nearby river and canal banks. The view across the water offered in the present work is extraordinary in the range of colors and varieties of spring foliage visible on the near bank: Sisley creates a subtly luscious landscape reflecting the light of the setting sun.
The composition of the present work reiterates Sisley’s individual approach to painterly surfaces and, in particular, his belief in the prominence of light, which functions for him as both a formal element and a fantastic phenomenon: “Objects should be rendered with their own textures and above all they should be bathed in light as they are in nature. This is what we should be striving to achieve. The sky is not simply a background: its planes give depth (for the sky has planes as well as solid ground), and the shapes of clouds give movement to a picture. What is more beautiful indeed than a summer sky with its wispy clouds idly floating across the blue? What movement and grace . . . They are like the waves at sea, one is uplifted and carried away” (V. Coudrey, Alfred Sisley: The English Impressionist, Exeter, 1992, p. 68).
Essay from Christie’s catalog, November, 2012
Throughout the 1880s, Sisley tirelessly explored the intersecting quays and waterways within a few miles of his home, near the confluence of the Seine and Loing. “He seemed unable for long to resist painting works in which there was water to offer its reflections, and river-banks to provide constantly changing activities,” Richard Shone has written (Sisley, exh. cat., London, 1992, p. 144). Although he recorded the expanse of the river from nearly every possible angle, he almost always set up his easel at the water’s edge; the present canvas is unusual in his oeuvre for its elevated vantage point and panoramic sweep. The scene was painted from a spot at the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau near Les Sablons, a modest hamlet where Sisley lived from 1883 until 1886. Standing on a steep rise above the plain of Veneux, Sisley looked northeast across the Seine toward the village of Champagne. In 1880, shortly after his arrival in the region, Sisley had painted Champagne at closer range, positioning himself directly across the river near the hamlet of By (Daulte, nos. 398, 406 and 466). These earlier views, however, are conspicuously social images, depicting washerwomen at the water’s edge and the path leading to the embarkation point of the old ferry to Champagne, which had gone out of use in 1872. The present painting, in contrast, is a vision of romantic, almost audacious solitude, the humming life of the quays too far below to discern and the buildings of Champagne a mere stippling in the distance.
Indeed, the main pictorial drama of the painting stems from its tension between near and far, between the rich, variegated surface and the powerful suggestion of recession. The trees on the hillside–some bare still from the winter, others dotted with cottony white blossoms– establish the foreground plane, which counters the depth imparted by the oblique swath of the river. At the same time, both the band of fallen blossoms and the line of the late afternoon shadow slice across the hillside on a diagonal, echoing the principal directional thrust of the composition. The active, heterogeneous brushwork and the juxtaposition of warm and cool hues in the foreground form a sharp contrast with the treatment of the water and sky, both of which are rendered exclusively in matte, horizontal strokes of blue (tinged with the faintest pink at the base of the sky to suggest the approach of dusk). The two banks of the river, on the other hand, are unified by their varied brushwork and even more so by their palette (predominantly russet in tone, with complimentary dashes of blue and green and heavily impastoed touches of white), compressing the apparent distance between near and far.
The first owner of the present painting was Erwin Davis, a prosperous, self-made businessman and one of the pioneering collectors of Impressionism in the United States. In 1880, Davis commissioned the American Impressionist painter J. Alden Weir to act as his agent in Paris and began to assemble a formidable collection that would eventually number over four hundred paintings, predominantly landscapes, by French Romantic, Barbizon, Realist, and Impressionist masters. The first large-scale introduction of Impressionism to American audiences came in 1886, when the Parisian dealer Paul Durand-Ruel mounted a spectacular exhibition of paintings by Sisley and his colleagues at the American Art Association and the National Academy of Design in New York. Along with Louisine Havemeyer and Alexander Cassatt, Davis was one of just three American collectors who loaned paintings to this show, and he was a principal buyer there as well. In 1889, he donated two paintings by Manet to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which became the first examples of the artist’s work to enter a museum collection. Shortly before his death in 1899, Davis returned a large cache of Impressionist paintings to Durand-Ruel, including seventeen by Monet, fourteen by Pissarro, and sixteen by Sisley, the present painting among them. The present landscape subsequently entered the distinguished collection of Frank Hadley Ginn and Cornelia Root Ginn, active patrons of music and art in Cleveland until their deaths in the late 1930s.
Pissarro
Essay from the Christie’s auction catalog of May 8, 2000
Camille Pissarro’s abundant paintings of the French landscape confirm the persistence of rural subjects at every stage of the artist’s career while their variety documents the transitions in both his creative process and his artistic goals. Art critic Théodore Duret heralded Pissarro’s attention to landscape painting in an important letter to the artist in December 1873:
I persist in thinking that nature, with its rustic fields and its animals is that which corresponds best to your talent. You do not have the decorative feeling of Sisley, not the fantastic eye of Monet, but you do have what they don’t, an intimate and profound feeling for nature, and a power in your brush that makes a good painting by you something with an absolute presence (R. Brettell, Pissarro and Pontoise: The Painter in a Landscape, New Haven and London, 1990, p. 165).
The present work provides an extraordinary example of the artist’s skillful contribution to the French landscape tradition and documents his unique position as an artistic link between the earlier achievements of the Barbizon School painters and the subsequent developments of artists as diverse as Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Georges Seurat.
Pissarro most often painted the landscape near his home, and his most celebrated canvases are those of the 1870s which depict the areas around Pointoise, where he lived with his family from 1872 to 1882. In late 1882 and 1883, the Pissarro family lived briefly in Osny–a village eighty kilometers northwest of Pointoise and the subject of the present work–before relocating permanently to Eragny in 1884. This period in the early 1880s was, for Pissarro, one of transition in living environments as well as in subject matter and artistic techniques. Between 1881 and 1883 Pissarro’s landscape production, so characteristic of his Pontoise period, dwindled in favor of monumental figure paintings which focused on market scenes and peasant labor. Eager to introduce an increased luminosity into his paintings, Pissarro embarked upon extensive pictorial experimentation which entailed a shift in practice. Not only did he engage in more studio work and increased drawing, he also began a series of works in other media, most notably tempera and gouache as well as printmaking, which he undertook with Edgar Degas, whom he declared in a letter of 1883 to be “without doubt, the greatest artist of our age.” (ibid., p. 191). While the brushwork of the present painting exhibits a spectacular brilliance that may be attributed to Pissarro’s contemporary experimentation, both its subject matter and composition recall the artist’s paintings of his late Pontoise period, and resemble the screened landscapes that predominate during the late 1870s and early 1880s (fig. 1). As a counterpart to his earlier panoramas, these wooded sous-bois settings which fascinated the artist are more confined in space and restricted in both color and touch. In these paintings, architecture no longer plays a central role in the construction of the picture. Instead, trees and vegetation dominate, their curving forms introducing a rhythmic pattern to the painted surfaces. As Richard Brettell has asserted, “. . . the aesthetic roots of these works lie in the sous-bois of the Barbizon School, in the silvery screens of late Corot (fig. 2), and in the foliated late landscapes of Courbet (fig. 3). Pissarro, during the last Pointoise period observed civilisation from nature. The trees form a complex and partial pictorial barrier between the viewer and the humanized world with which he most clearly identifies” (ibid., p. 192).
Like many of Pissarro’s landscapes from the early 1880s, the present work reveals a cluster of contradictions. The path on which the villagers walk opens at the foreground, seeming to invite the viewer into the scene, but the distribution of trees in the middle ground, as Brettell argues, prevents an easy entry. At the same time, the two trees at the center arch in near symmetry, but the imbalance between the sequence of thinner trunks on the left and the density of heavier foliage on the right, along with the gentle diagonal of the country path, undermine any sense of lateral equilibrium, or ordered nature in the composition. This dynamic effect is only intensified in the dance of staccato strokes which transition from rich shadow to striking illumination in their movement from left to right, both in the trees of the foreground and on the house in the background.
Exceptional for both its stunning brushwork, evident in Pissarro’s volumetric and rhythmic treatment of this setting, and its structural juxtaposition of warm and cool colors, visible in the cool pinks of the architecture and the acidic greens of the leaves, this painting anticipates the similar execution of Cézanne’s landscapes. The careful construction of such canvases, often studied from nature and meticulously reworked in the studio, confirms Pissarro’s stature as an artist of supreme technical facility. In a remark written in 1920, but based on earlier notes of the 1890s and previous conversations with the artist, critic Georges Lecomte proclaims:
Certainly Camille Pissarro painted thousands of studies and hundreds of canvases after nature. But, from an early stage in his career as a painter passionately involved in research, most of this paintings were executed in the studio, with much deliberation, after studies made directly in front of the motif, with absolute keeping with the original emotion . . . Camille Pissarro abandons himself freely to the sensation, which he would never give up for any theory or any system. But he also constructs, he selects, he arranges” (ibid.,, p. 201).
(fig. 1) Camille Pissarro, Le Fond de L’Hermitage, Pontoise, 1879, Cleveland Museum of Art.
(fig. 2) Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, La Rive verte, 1860-1865, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
(fig. 3) Gustave Courbet, Remise de chevreuils au ruisseau de Plaisir-Fontaine, 1866, Musée du Louvre.
Catalog raisonée entry
Toulouse-Lautrec, Miss May Belfort
Literature
G. Coquiot, Lautrec, ou quinze ans de moeurs Parisiennes, 1885-1900, Paris, 1921, p. 164.
M. Joyant, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paris, 1926, p. 290.
G. Mack, Toulouse-Lautrec, New York, 1938, p. 176.
M.G. Dortu, Toulouse-Lautrec, Paris, 1952, p. 6.
J. Lassaigne, Le goût de notre temps, Lautrec, Geneva, 1953, p. 79.
H.P. Landolt, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Farbige Zeichnungen, Basel, 1954, no. 17 (illustrated).
G. Caproni & G.M. Sugana, L’Opera completa di Toulouse-Lautrec, Milan, 1969, no. 424a, p. 114 (illustrated).
M.G. Dortu, Toulouse-Lautrec et son oeuvre, vol. III, New York, 1971, no. 589, p. 363 (illustrated).
J. Polasek, Toulouse-Lautrec Drawings, New York, 1975, no. 12 (illustrated).
Louisiana Revy, vol. 35, no. 1, November 1994, p. 39 (illustrated).
Exhibited
Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Peintures et lithographies originales de Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1910, no. 25.
Paris, Galerie Manzi-Joyant, Exposition rétrospective de l’oeuvre Toulouse-Lautrec, 1914, no. 155.
Cambridge, MA, Fogg Art Museum, Toulouse-Lautrec, 1929.
Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Trentenaire, 1931, no. 139.
Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Lithographs by Toulouse-Lautrec, 1933. New York, Knoedler Gallery, Toulouse-Lautrec, Paintings, Drawings and Posters, 1937, no. 21 (illustrated).
New York, Museum of Modern Art, Modern Drawings, 1944.
New York, Wildenstein & Co., Toulouse-Lautrec, 1946, no. 29, p. 38 (illustrated).
Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute, Paintings, Drawings, Prints and Posters by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, March – April 1947.
Cleveland, Museum of Art, Toulouse-Lautrec, January – February 1951.
Philadelphia, Museum of Art, Toulouse-Lautrec, October – December 1955, no. 62 (illustrated); this exhibition later travelled to Chicago, The Art Institute, January – February 1956.
New York, Museum of Modern Art, Toulouse-Lautrec, Paintings, Drawings, Posters and Lithographs, March – May 1956, no. 33.
Montreal, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Toulouse-Lautrec, 1864-1901, April – June 1968, no. 14.
New York, Museum of Modern Art, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Images of the 1890s, November 1985 – January 1986, no. 267, p. 232 (illustrated p. 236).
Humlebaek, Denmark, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Toulouse-Lautrec and Paris, November 1994 – February 1995, no. 39 (illustrated).
Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Qui a peur du rouge?, June – September 1995, no. 73 (illustrated).
London, Royal Academy of Arts, From Manet to Gauguin, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from Swiss Private Collections, June – October 1995, no. 63 (illustrated p. 163); this exhibition later travelled to Tokyo, Sezon Museum of Art, October 1995 – January 1996; and Nagoya, Matsuzakaya Art Museum, February – March 1996.
Seoul, Gana Art Center, From Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism, April 1996.
Sapporo, Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Exhibition from Swiss Private Collections, Coordinated by Ernst Beyeler, May – June 1996, no. 9, p. 35 (illustrated); this exhibition later travelled to Nagasaki, Huis ten Bosch Museum of Art, June – August 1996; Kyoto, Municipal Museum of Art, August – September 1996; and Tokyo, Mitsukoshi Museum of Art, October – November 1996.
Andros, Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation, Toulouse-Lautrec – Woman as Myth, June – September 2001, no. 6 (illustrated).
Essay
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s life has become the stuff of legend, not least because he immortalised, in his pictures and in the stories about his life, the decadence and glamour of the cabarets of fin-de-siècle Paris. Indeed, many of the names of the performers in the café-concerts of the age live on in part through Toulouse-Lautrec’s iconic posters and pictures of the time. Executed in 1895, Miss May Belfort is a vivid, lively picture of the singer of the same name, one of a group of depictions of her that Toulouse-Lautrec made that year. This picture would serve as the basis for one of Toulouse-Lautrec’s celebrated posters; in fact, he had been approached by May Belfort to create a poster to advertise her run at the Petit Casino that year. Belfort would go on to inspire a number of depictions by Toulouse-Lautrec, including a series of lithographs. In his monograph on the artist, Jean Bouret discussed their acquaintance:
‘the ideal companion for the Irish Bar was May Belfort, a dark-haired Irish girl with an exquisite complexion who had made her debut in London and then come to Paris, singing at the Eden Concert, the Jardin de Paris, the Olympia, and the Décadents in the rue Fontaine. She was a friend of Jane Avril and of another dancer, May Milton. Lautrec soon made a conquest of her, for behind a demure exterior she concealed a highly-developed taste for vice. She had an affair with Jane Avril, but was not, like May Milton, a declared and exclusive lesbian. If a micheton – a casual contact who would pay for her favours – came along, she would take him. She was known to some people as “the orchid” because of her pink, petal-like skin, and to others as “the frog”, because of her mouth. Lautrec was the antithesis of a micheton, and she soon slipped away from his embraces, but she still posed for him’ (J. Bouret, Toulouse-Lautrec, London, 1964, pp. 176-77).
The poster for which Belfort posed has since been widely published and has become an icon in its own right; however, it is fascinating, looking at Miss May Belfort, to note some of the key differences between the two works. The poster has a very different dynamism, in part because of the solid red swathe of the singer’s dress; in Miss May Belfort, by contrast, the red is made all the more lively by Toulouse-Lautrec’s vigorous brushwork, with the slashing strokes of her swaying garment which deliberately taper out towards the bottom, adding an ethereal air that also creates a contrast with the more densely-worked area of the face, the hair and the cat.
The various elements of the poster, including the name of the singer herself, present in Miss May Belfort as an abbreviated ‘MAY BE’, and the grid of the wall in the background, are all present here. However, in Miss May Belfort, the face and the hair in particular have been rendered with particular attention, showing the incredible ability of the artist to penetrate beneath make-up, beneath veneers, and create grippingly psychological depictions of his subjects. The raking lighting from below that Toulouse-Lautrec has captured in this picture removes some of the prettiness present in the poster, allowing the artist instead to reveal more of the character and the nature of his subject. It was this trait, this ability to show the humans around him as they were, that lends many of his works such a timeless character; it has been suggested that his own hatred of the way people treated him because of his conspicuously short stature, the product of an accident, may have given him an extra insight into creating his searingly penetrating and perceptive portraits; Toulouse-Lautrec’s ability to show an unvarnished yet truthful image of his friends and acquaintances may also have been a result of the fact that, because of his extensive allowance, he hardly needed to sell his works and therefore could essentially do what he wanted. This is clearly the case with Miss May Belfort which presents this character with a similar directness seen in some of the images of his friend and muse, Jane Avril.
May Belfort was born May Egan in Ireland and had made her name on the stage in London before moving to Paris. Her act, which Lautrec would have seen at the Cabaret des Décadents, consisted of dressing as a child, similar to those from Kate Greenaway’s books, and singing a range of songs, some of them folk or cabaret classics, others which deliberately played upon double entendres. It is singing one of these, perhaps her best-known number, in which she held a little black cat, that she appears to be shown in Miss May Belfort.
According to another book, Toulouse-Lautrec himself, a keen aficionado of so much that came from England, would sing refrains from the same song while working (see P. Huysman & M.G. Dortu, Lautrec by Lautrec, trans. C. Bellow, London, 1964, p. 113). Belfort, when not holding her cat, would often stand rigid on the stage, her arms pinned to her sides, as is depicted in another of Toulouse-Lautrec’s pictures of her, Miss May Belfort en bébé de Kate Greenaway, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Belfort’s black cat was briefly famous because of her stage appearance, and featured on both a Christmas card and a menu that Toulouse-Lautrec made for her in 1896. In fact, possibly inspired by Belfort, Toulouse-Lautrec appears himself to have acquired a cat.
It is a tribute to the quality and importance of Miss May Belfort that it has such an extensive exhibition history, having already been shown in 1910 before it featured in the important posthumous retrospective organised by Toulouse-Lautrec’s friend, Maurice Joyant, in 1914. This picture was formerly owned by César M. de Hauke, an important art critic, dealer and collector who was in part responsible for the publication of M.G. Dortu’s catalogue raisonné of Lautrec’s works. De Hauke’s attention and his own bequest of works on paper helped raise the entire standard of the important collection of nineteenth century French drawings owned by the British Museum in London.
Gobelin Tapestries of the Four Seasons
Two tapestries from another set of the four were sold at Christie’s in 2000. The sale catalog has a paragraph discussing that set and three others, including the Ginns’ set.
TWO TAPESTRIES FROM THE CANFORD MANOR SET OF ‘THE SEASONS OF LUCAS’
These magnificent tapestries are two from a complete set of four ‘Seasons of Lucas’ tapestries formerly owned by the Viscount Wimborne at Canford Manor, Dorset and sold as one lot at Christie’s London, 6-8 March 1923, lot 148. These tapestries were almost certainly acquired in the 19th Century by either Josiah John Guest, 1st Baronet, (1785-1852) or his son Ivor, 2nd Baronet, (1835-1916), who was created Baron Wimborne of Canford Magna in 1880. Edith Stanton records only three further complete sets of the Four Seasons: one is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; a second from Balloch Castle, Scotland, woven with metallic threads and lacking borders, was sold from the Collection of Henry Simons at Anderson Galleries, New York, 27 January-3 February 1923, lots 1166-69, and was subsequently in the Frank H. Ginn Collection. It is now in the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio. The fourth set is recorded as being in the Collection of Mme. de Pruynes in 1930 (see E. Standen, op. cit., p. 322). The designs for these tapestries must have been executed in the same workshop as the Mois de Lucas, the source for which were twelve Brussels tapestries belonging to Louis XIV woven about 1535 and destroyed in 1797. They were mistakenly thought to have been executed by Lucas van Leyden. As they have not been attributed to a specific artist, the designer of this series is accordingly called the Master of the Months of Lucas (ibid, p. 332). The border designs of fruiting floral garlands entwining hounds chasing hares are found in several other tapestries: a Brussels tapestry called The Riding Lesson, circa 1655, manufacture of Heinrich Reydams and formely in the Rosenfeld-Goldschmidt Collection (see H. Göbel, Tapestries of the Lowlands, 1924, fig. 284); a Brussels tapestry from the series The Four Elements: Earth and Fire by Jans Frans Van den Hecke, circa 1680 at the Residenz, Schloss Würzburg (H. Göbel, op. cit., fig. 507) and a 17th century Flemish tapestry from Bruges, The Twelve Months, now Austrian State Property (ibid, fig. 468a).
Pissarro, Marché du Gisors.
An image similar to the one the Ginns owned sold at Christie’s in 2018. Here is the essay about it from the sale catalog.
On Monday mornings, Camille Pissarro often joined his wife Julie and a couple of their children, with some household helpers, for the two-and-a-half-mile excursion from their home in Éragny to attend market day in Gisors, a town of about four thousand inhabitants further down the Epte River. While Julie stocked up on produce and provisions for the coming week, Pissarro sketched the many people from Gisors and nearby villages who gathered among the stalls set up on the Grand-Rue (today the rue de Vienne) near the town hall, as they engaged in selling, buying, or bartering, exchanging news, and socializing during this all-important, weekly communal event.
The simple human interaction in this pre-capitalist exchange of goods appealed to Pissarro’s life-long dedication to the fundamental principles of non-violent anarchist theory: egalitarianism, freedom from tyranny, the satisfaction derived from honest, unexploited labor, and a belief in the evolution of society toward a more peaceable and harmonious condition. From the drawn studies Pissarro elaborated a key theme in his later oeuvre—le marché, the market scene. He typically peopled these pictures with more figures in various postures than a viewer can readily count. The artist completed between 1880 and 1901 around three dozen gouaches and pastels of this kind, as well as numerous other works on paper, including prints.
The present Le Marché de Gisors is one of only five versions of this genre that Pissarro painted in oils on canvas; none is more than 32 inches (82 cm.) in height. Pissarro intended to market these socially-themed pictures to a wide public. In the hope of appealing to buyers of lesser means, who shied away from the prices dealers asked for large oil paintings, he valued these more modestly scaled scenes, in oil or gouache, at affordable levels.
The initial public appearance of the market subject in Pissarro’s work were three gouaches, painted in Pontoise, which the artist included in the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition, 1882. The present canvas, completed several years later, is the first of the three that Pissarro painted in Éragny, his final home (the others are Pissarro and Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, no. 1013 [1893] and no. 1097 [1895]). The figures in Pissarro’s market scenes are predominantly women, in important roles as both providers and consumers. The artist understood the powerful matriarchal impetus that still shaped agrarian society at that time, as it had in antiquity and prehistory as well.