One of the most devoted members of the Impressionist group in the 1870s and 1880s, Pissarro returned to his early Impressionist manner at the end of the century, producing canvases like this one that are densely painted with short, decisive strokes. In 1900 Pissarro visited Berneval, a middle-class resort town on the Normandy coast where one senses the aging bohemian may not have felt quite at home. While the lush hillside and garden gate at left invite us into the composition, the broader landscape and distant cliffs present a somewhat flat, forbidding prospect. The writer Oscar Wilde had given an account of the picturesque retreat three years earlier: “Berneval is a tiny place consisting of a hotel and about twenty chalets: the people who come here are des bons bourgeois as far as I can see. The sea has a lovely beach, to which one descends through a small ravine, and the land is full of trees and flowers…”
Details
- Artist Name: Camille Pissarro (French, 1830-1903)
- Title: View of Berneval
- Date: 1900
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 28-3/4 x 36-1/4 in. (73.0 x 92.1 cm)
- Credit Line: Norton Simon Art Foundation, from the Estate of Jennifer Jones Simon
- Accession Number: M.2010.1.9.P
- Copyright: © Norton Simon Art Foundation
Object Information
[Sam Salz (1894-1981), New York, sold April 1957 to];
Florence Homolka.
(sale, London, Sotheby’s, 28 June 1967, lot 46, as Vue de Berneval, to);
Norton Simon, sold 7 May 1981, 1/3 share, to;
[William Beadleston, Inc., New York];
Norton Simon (sale, London, Christie’s, 19 May 1982, lot 20, as Vue de Berneval, bought-in);
[William Beadleston, Inc., New York, sold 6 April 1984, 1/3 share, to];
Norton Simon, by bequest to;
Jennifer Jones Simon Art Trust, to;
Norton Simon Art Foundation.
Centenaire de la naissance de Camille Pissarro
- Paris, Musée de l'Orangerie, 1930-02 to 1930-03
Images of the Landscape, Barbizon and Impressionist Paintings from the Permanent Collection
- Norton Simon Museum, 1987-07-02 to 1989-10-29
- Pissarro, Ludovic Rodo; and Lionello Venturi, Camille Pissarro: son art-son oeuvre,
- Cogniat, Raymond, Pissarro, p. 74
- Kunstler, Charles, Camille Pissarro,
- Joachim Pissarro, Claire Durand-Ruel, Catalogue raisonne de Camille Pissarro - peintures, 2005, Plate 1331 p. 820
- Brettell, Richard R. and Stephen F. Eisenman, Nineteenth-Century Art in the Norton Simon Museum, volume 1, 2006,
- Campbell, Sara, Collector Without Walls: Norton Simon and His Hunt for the Best, 2010, cat. 356 p. 288
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