The Camden Town Group in Context

Purchased from the artist 1924.

Almond Trees, Le Lavandou is painted on a plain-weave linen canvas which has a white commercial ground. It is on a five-member softwood stretcher with iron tacks; it is not known if they are original.

The painting has been drawn in thin blue paint and then painted more or less alla prima in lean paint with moderately impasted brushstrokes. Triangular areas at the top left and right were left unpainted. The final impastos were dabbed on, which has left sharp peaked mounds of paint. In the sky Pissarro’s brushmarks form clear diagonal cross-hatched lines but are more irregular elsewhere following the drawing. The almond blossom appears to have been painted after the rest of the composition was completed and is less successfully integrated into the composition.

Compared to Pissarro’s much earlier April, Epping 1894 (Tate N04747), Almond Trees, Le Lavandou has thinner paint, more sparingly applied with significant gaps between applications where the ground shows through. Blue underpaint remains visible and the overall surface is more matt, possibly because the thinner paint has ‘sunk’ over the lean ground. The handling is also more confident and restrained; it retains its drawn quality, is more linear, and with less broken colour.

No varnish has been applied to the painting, but some accumulated surface dirt gives it a dusty appearance. There is evidence of handling and stacking in the studio, which has caused superficial damage to the still wet paint.

The clear winter sky of Provence is recorded in the light tonality of this painting. Le Lavandou, at the time this painting was made in 1923, was a small fishing village on the western end of the French Riviera, between Hyères and St Tropez. Pissarro’s diary for that year opens with him and his wife Esther staying at the Villa Boniol at Bormes-les-Mimosa, just outside Le Lavandou.1 They rented this house partly for reasons of his health, allowing him to escape the British winter, but also in order to be with his elderly mother, who was staying with them and was unwell (she died in 1926). They were able to afford this visit after the success of his exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in London in October 1922.2 On 20 January, he started a picture of mimosas,3 and four days later began to paint the almond trees, as his diary reads:

It thus took twelve mornings’ work to make this painting over a period of twenty-three days, in the middle of which he seems to have slowed up to await the opening of the blossom. The colour is applied quite thinly in comparison to the earlier paintings by Pissarro in the Tate collection, and the white ground of the canvas shows through in various places, especially around the trunks and branches of the trees. The canvas is unpainted in each top corner, behind the rebate of the frame, perhaps because of some clips to keep it on the easel. The blossom of the five almond trees is dabbed on top of the painting of the branches, in shades of pink with blue, red and mauve.

The mountains at Le Lavandou go right down to the sea, and in choosing subjects to paint Pissarro avoided the port and the more picturesque views of the slopes. The practice of local farming is illustrated clearly in this painting, and the shadows of the trees make switchbacks which emphasise the furrows, and he includes at the lower right corner a farmer’s hut of stone. This orchard and level field is the kind of subject that had appealed to Vincent van Gogh in Provence, or, in northern France, to his father Camille Pissarro. The family conversation at this time was at least once about Camille’s painting: just after Lucien had completed The Almond Trees, he recorded in his diary on 18 February: ‘No work. Scene parce que maman pretend que [Scene because mama claims that] father did work only to make money.’ Thus, even in the 1920s, Lucien was still not far from the world of the first impressionists.

He had anticipated painting the fruit trees, and had written to his daughter Orovida on 29 December 1922: ‘I have several things in hand and love this place, full of variety – presently it will be gorgious [sic] with orchard of peach and almond trees in blossom’.4 It was the first time he had painted in the south of France, but he returned there for several years, and bought a house near Toulon in 1929 which he called Campagne Orovida, after his daughter. In Anne Thorold’s catalogue of Pissarro’s oil paintings there are seventeen landscapes of Le Lavandou listed for 1922–3.5 Most are of cultivated fields, a farmhouse and mountains, and give overall an impression of historic farm life, comparable to Camille Pissarro’s views of Pontoise and Eragny (Tate N06003, fig.1).

The curator and conservative critic James Laver wrote at the time that the Provençal paintings were Pissarro’s best:

Pissarro’s paintings of Provence sold well in an exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, London, in October 1924. The row with his mother on 18 February the year before may have been because Lucien felt defensive about painting subjects as popular as the south of France. Pissarro’s friend J.B. Manson reproduced the painting in both his books on the Tate Gallery, in 1926 and 1929, praising it for its accuracy of colours, the ‘extraordinary effect of recession with pure colour’.7

Anne Thorold mentions that a drawing of this composition belonged in 1958 to Raymond Mortimer (1895–1980).8 Mortimer, a literary critic and one of the Bloomsbury circle, wrote the ‘Appreciation’ in the catalogue of Pissarro’s memorial exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in January 1946.9 He praised Pissarro for his professionalism and seriousness, describing him as a nineteenth-century French artist, in a separate category from a slightly younger but more modern artist like Henri Matisse.