Donkey in Front of a Farm, Montmorency

In the 1850s Montmorency, a hill village north of Paris, was a favourite outing from the city, and its donkeys were part of the draw. On Sundays they were hired out for rides through the forest above the town. Pissarro spent summers there painting outdoors. Here a donkey stands saddled in a farmyard, framed by the posts of a gateway, while a woman in a red headscarf appears in the doorway beyond. The oil is on a wooden panel roughly the size of a sheet of letter paper, and the Musée d'Orsay calls it a sketch for the Montmorency landscape he showed at the Salon of 1859. Low on the left he signed it “C. Pizarro”, with a z. By 1865 he had given it to the collector Georges d'Albenas, whose great-nephew, a baron in Montpellier, donated it to the French state in 1943.