Chrysanthemums in a Chinese Vase

Pissarro painted very few still lifes. He was a landscape man, out in the fields around Pontoise, where he settled after the war of 1870 with Prussia, during which many of the canvases he had left behind at Louveciennes were destroyed. This is one of a small group of indoor pictures he made at Pontoise around 1872 and 1873, several of them set against the same striped wallpaper, whose stripes run against the loose heads of the flowers. The chrysanthemum was a recent arrival in French gardens and came with the fashion for Japanese things. Monet, Renoir and Caillebotte all painted them in those years too. In the same months Pissarro was helping draft the rules of the artists' society that put on the first Impressionist exhibition in the spring of 1874. The gallery in Dublin bought the picture at auction in New York in 1983.