O Marne em Chennevières

Pissarro was in his mid-30s and still years away from Impressionism when he painted this broad reach of the river Marne, south-east of Paris, around 1865. He was renting a house in the village on the near bank, and the church and roofs of Chennevieres sit small on the far side. The picture is large and deliberately built, closer to older landscape painters like Corot and Daubigny than to anything radical, and Pissarro laid much of the paint on with a palette knife, a trick he took from the realist Courbet. He sent it to the official Salon in 1865, where work like this could still be shown. A small factory and a ferry boat slip quietly into the scene, the modern world at the edge of the fields.