Faneuses (Haymakers)
Camille Pissarro
Description
Gallery Rotation Spring/Summer 2012
Camille Pissarro
France, 1830–1903
Haymakers
1890
Etching and drypoint
Museum purchase, 1953/2.48
Millet and Pissarro were important printmakers and contributed to the revival of interest in printmaking in France in the second half of the nineteenth
century. Millet brought to his work an emphasis on line as well as a nuanced tonal quality and a concern with printing effects: the printed impressions of his Two Cows can be tremendously varied in their inks and papers.
Pissarro was a prolific printmaker and his Haymakers, an important subject for the artist, shows his debt to Millet’s imagery. He too was attentive to the printing process and his impressions are often annotated; the inscription on the Vachere au bord de l’eau (cowherder at the water’s edge) indicates that it was an artist’s proof (epreuve d’artiste). This was a work of art in its own right, not one in a series of steps towards a final state of the image. The deep contrasts
of light and dark in this version give it an elegiac quality.
Subject Matter:
Pissarro lends dignity to these fieldworkers by making the woman in the foreground a simple compact shape and in the way that he allows this figure to dominate the scene.
Physical Description:
A group of women can be seen in a field raking hay. The central woman faces the viewer in the foreground; she wears a hat that shades her face. Behind her are two other women, also raking hay, shown from behind.
Usage Rights:
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