Bords de rivière was once owned by Edgar Degas, who built a formidable collects ion over his life, the extent of which came to light only upon his death. Degas’s collects ion consisted of a breadth of historical periods and media and reflected his admiration for Old Masters and early nineteenth-century Neoclassicists and Romantics. Nearly all the major Impressionists were also well-represented in the collects ion, a test.mes nt to the robust exchange of ideas and interwoven influences among the group.
Highlights from Edgar Degas’ Personal collects ion
Painted in 1871, Bords de rivière is an important early example of the artist’s lifelong interest in rural landscapes. In December 1870, assisted by a 300 franc loan from some friends of his neighbor Ludovic Piette, Pissarro and his young family sailed from Saint-Malo to England. The Prussian invasion had created an increasingly dangerous situation in and around Paris and prompted Pissarro and many of his fellow painters, including Claude Monet, to seek refuge elsewhere. Pissarro returned to France in July 1871. When he arrived at his home in Louveciennes, he found that it had been occupied and pillaged by Prussians, his spare canvases used for aprons and cleaning. The present work is one of the few pictures that he painted in the vicinity of Paris that year and shows no sign of the disruption of the previous months. As Ralph E. Shikes and Paula Harper write: “Philosophical about his loss, Camille went back to work ‘serenely,’…His response to a setback was usually to plunge into work…As he later expressed it to the critic and novelist Octave Mirbeau, ‘Work is a marvellous regulator of moral and physical health. All the sadnesses, all the bitterness, all the grief, I am unaware of them, in the joy of working’” (Ralph E. Shikes & Paula Harper, Pissarro, His Life and Work, London, Melbourne & New York, 1980, p. 101).
Upon return from wart.mes exile, Pissarro resumed his experimentation with en plein air painting as he marched energetically toward Impressionism. Compared to his canvases from a few years prior, the brushwork in Bords de rivière is looser and begins to assume quick, dashing qualities. Pissarro pays particular attention to the subtle variations of color in the sky and manipulates light, shadow, and reflections in the water to create a fleeting sense of atmosphere. The single sailboat, the sparse buildings, and the lonesome figure harmoniously ground the composition while the sweeping curve of the riverbank conveys depth. Thus in Bords de rivière, one finds both the seeds of a radical new style and Pissarro’s connection to traditional landscape painters. According to Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro and Monet, who lived nearby in Argenteuil, may have agreed to set up their easels to paint this scene side-by-side.
