Vue de Zevekote, Knokke belongs to a small group of fourteen canvases painted by Camille Pissarro in Knokke, a seaside town outside of the Belgian city of Bruges. Pissarro, his wife Julie and their son Félix had already been planning a trip to Belgium in 1894, but their departure was hastened by the assasination of Sadi Carnot, the President of France, by the Italian anarchist Sante Geronimo Caserio. The initial reason for the family’s journey was apparently due to the “pranks and escapades of their [Pissarro and Julie’s] skirt-chasing son Félix” (Joachim Pissarro & Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro: Catalogue critique des peintures, vol. III, Paris, 2005, p. 664). They decided to remove Félix from the temptations of Éragny “... to Belgium, where he did not know a soul” (ibid.). However personal to the Pissarro family the motivations of the trip to Belgium initially appeared, the passage of a law in the French Parliament directed at all anarchists, whether active or passive, meant that Pissarro would stay in Belgium much longer than he intended. He subscribed to a number of anarchist publications and the arrests of contemporaries like Maximilien Luce and Felix Fénéon decided the matter.

From Brussels Pissarro traveled on to Bruges and then, in the company of Théo van Rysselberghe, continued to Knokke-sur-Mer where he would paint the majority of the oils created during his stay. The distinctive topography of the seaside resort town, with its windmills and churches seen from across the dunes, was of considerable appeal to Pissarro (see fig. 1). Vue de Zevekote, Knokke illustrates the artist’s delight with the landscape, the rolling grounds punctuated by red-roofed houses and large, open skies filled with scudding clouds—perhaps a nod to the unsettled weather Pissarro complained of frequently during his stay. Van Rysselberghe too would use the summer of 1894 to create glorious depictions of the area. While Pissarro’s paintings from Knokke harmonize all aspects of the landscape together, van Rysselberghe’s tend towards the more dramatic, using heavy shadow are sharper contrast in coloration to focus on one or two specific aspects of each composition (see fig. 3).

One of the most prominent avant-garde painters of his generation, Pissarro had achieved enormous success as both an Impressionist and a Neo-Impressionist painter. Adjusting certain elements from his classic Impressionist period of the 1870s and combining them with characteristics of his Neo-Impressionist style of the 1880s, Pissarro began developing a fresh approach to painting in the early 1890s. This new-found stability is reflected in the present work in the sense of unity and harmony between nature and the man-made. Gauguin wrote in 1902: “If the whole of Pissarro’s art is examined, we find there, in spite of fluctuations, not only an unfailing surfeit of artistic will, but also an essentially intuitive, thoroughbred art. However distant the haystack might be, over there on the slope, Pissarro will always rouse himself, walk round it, examine it.…. In a shop window, I saw a charming fan of his— a humble, half-open gate separates two very green (Pissarro Green) meadows, letting through a flock of geese who march forward with a watchful eye, saying worriedly to one another: ‘Are we going to Seurat’s or to Millet’s?’ In the end, they all go to Pissarro’s” (quoted in Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snoellaerts, ibid., pp. 247-48).