Camille Pissarro

An avid draftsman, Pissarro rarely left his studio without a sketchbook to record his observations. The catalogue of the over three hundred drawings by Pissarro in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, provides an excellent summary of the artist's work as a draftsman (Brettell and Lloyd 1980). In 1879 his career reached a turning point with a series of peasant images that marked the shift in his interest from urban and rural landscapes to genre scenes, largely under the influence of Degas, with whom Pissarro began to work on prints. Regarding figure studies, he wrote to his son Lucien on 5 July 1883; “Don't strive for skillful line, strive for simplicity, for the essential lines which give the physiognomy...Rather incline toward caricature than toward prettiness” (Bailly-Herzberg 1980, 166). This simple, strong sense of line and concentration on salient detail is evident in many of Pissarro's later drawings, including this sheet. The later works are on a larger scale and are more boldly executed than his earlier drawings.
This study of two young peasant girls is preliminary to a sheet drawn in black chalk, watercolor, and gouache, dated Eragny 1890 (private collection, Toronto; Pissarro and Venturi 1939, no. 1445, repr.), which was used by the artist four years later as the basis for an etching in color, Young Beggar Girl (Delteil 1923, no. 110). Pissarro depicted two young women in peasant dress seen from behind and inscribed color notations along the left margin of the sheet. The notations confirm that he intended the drawing to serve as a basis for the watercolor. As with many of his late drawings, Pissarro studied the figures in isolation on the page with little or no suggestion of a setting. In the watercolor and print the figures of the two girls overlap as they stand close to one another on a path in front of a gate.
This work, one of the artist's rare depictions of the rural poor, was executed late in his career in his studio at Eragny par Gisors, Eure, northwest of Paris. Although known for his landscape paintings, during the 1880s Pissarro developed an interest in representing the human figure. He produced a large number of figure drawings albeit few paintings with figures, between 1880 and 1903. Conversely he made few landscape drawings, although the subject dominates his painted oeuvre from this period. Over the course of the decade he developed an elaborate preparatory process for his compositions and produced numerous studies from life of peasants at work. Like the present drawing, many of these studies represent young women and were made from costumed models who posed in the studio. This sheet may have belonged to a sketchbook from about 1890 that remained in Pissarro's studio at the time of his death. It, along with a sheet in the Louvre, Étude pour La Causette (RF 29534) bears a number in the upper left corner as well as the atelier stamp with the artist's initials.