The Ferry at La Varenne-Saint-Hilaire

In September 1859 a railway opened from the Bastille in Paris to La Varenne, on a loop of the Marne, and Parisians started coming out for days on the river. Pissarro moved to La Varenne-Saint-Hilaire in 1863, and in the catalogue of the 1864 Salon he still called himself a pupil of Corot and of the Danish painter Anton Melbye. This small canvas shows the crossing named in its title. A flat ferry carries a horse-drawn yellow carriage and a few passengers, a rowing boat is pulled in at the sandy near bank, and houses line the ridge beyond under a grey sky. He signed and dated it low on the right, C. Pissarro 64. Few of his early pictures survive, since almost all of them were lost when his house at Louveciennes was wrecked in the war of 1870.