Landscape at Chaponval

Chaponval is a hamlet of Auvers-sur-Oise, a short way up the river from Pontoise, where Pissarro was living in 1880. He sets it low in the picture, a row of pale houses with red and slate-blue roofs, with a steep green hillside climbing behind them to a few trees against white clouds. In the meadow in front, a woman in dark clothes stands beside a brown cow grazing with its head down. The signature and the date, 80, are at the lower right. The canvas later belonged to Antonin Personnaz, a collector from Bayonne who knew the painter. Before the First World War Personnaz took up the autochrome, the first practical process for colour photographs, and made over 1,000 plates, whose grainy colour he thought close to the Impressionists' broken touch. His bequest brought this landscape to the Louvre in 1937.