Poultry Market at Gisors

Gisors was the market town nearest to Éragny, a few kilometres up the river Epte, and Pissarro came back to its markets again and again, in paint and in prints. This one from 1885 is the poultry market under the trees, a press of women in headscarves and white aprons and men in blue smocks, with live hens beside a crate down at the bottom right. It is a big square sheet, 82 centimetres each way, done in tempera with pastel. Some of the pastel was crushed into a paste and brushed on, some rubbed on dry, so the surface sits halfway between painting and drawing. Its first owner was very probably Claude Monet, who lived some 35 kilometres away at Giverny and seems to have had it straight from Pissarro. Monet lent it to the memorial exhibition of Pissarro's work that Durand-Ruel held in Paris in April 1904, five months after his death. In 1938 Monet's son Michel sold it to the dealers Wildenstein, and within weeks it had gone to a collector in Boston.