Flower Bouquet: Peonies and Mock-Orange

In 1878 the Impressionists put on no group show at all. Paris that summer belonged to the Exposition Universelle, the world's fair on the Champ de Mars, and Pissarro was out at Pontoise, northwest of the city, deep in debt. Still life was rare for him. Out of well over a thousand canvases only a couple of dozen are arrangements like this one, and this one belongs to June, when peonies and mock-orange flower together. A few weeks of one garden, cut and carried indoors to a blue and white vase of the East Asian kind French households had taken to. He kept the painting. His widow Julie handed it to their son Ludovic-Rodo, born in that same year of 1878, and it left the family only in 1949, when a dealer in New York bought it.