Sunlight on the Road, Pontoise

Jean-Baptiste Faure was the leading baritone of the Paris Opéra, the singer who created the title role in Ambroise Thomas's Hamlet in 1868, and through the 1870s he spent his fees on pictures by Manet and by the landscape painters who would soon be called Impressionists. He was born in 1830, the same year as Pissarro. The 1939 catalogue of Pissarro's work places this canvas in Faure's collection, and a name read as his is written, faintly, on the back of the stretcher. Pissarro painted it at Pontoise in 1874 and signed and dated it at the lower right. A village road runs beside the river, and the sun coming through a stand of trees lies across it in long strokes of pale, buttery paint. A woman, a child and a man on horseback pass one another on the road. Durand-Ruel's New York branch had it by 1919, and it came to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1925 with the bequest of the Boston collector Robert J. Edwards.