1900, Camille Pissarro, View of Berneval -- Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena)
From the museum label: One of the most devoted members of the Impressionist group in the 1870s and 1880s, Pissarro returned to his early Impressionist manner at the end of the century, producing canvases like this one that are densely painted with short, decisive strokes. In 1900 Pissarro visited Berneval, a middle-class resort town on the Normandy coast where one senses the aging bohemian may not have felt quite at home. While the lush hillside and garden gate at left invite us into the composition, the broader landscape and distant cliffs present a somewhat flat, forbidding prospect. The writer Oscar Wilde had given an account of the picturesque retreat three years earlier: "Berneval is a tiny place consisting of a hotel and about twenty chalets: the people who come here are des bons bourgeois as far as I can see. The sea has a lovely beach, to which one descends through a small ravine, and the land is full of trees and flowers..."
1900, Camille Pissarro, View of Berneval -- Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena)
From the museum label: One of the most devoted members of the Impressionist group in the 1870s and 1880s, Pissarro returned to his early Impressionist manner at the end of the century, producing canvases like this one that are densely painted with short, decisive strokes. In 1900 Pissarro visited Berneval, a middle-class resort town on the Normandy coast where one senses the aging bohemian may not have felt quite at home. While the lush hillside and garden gate at left invite us into the composition, the broader landscape and distant cliffs present a somewhat flat, forbidding prospect. The writer Oscar Wilde had given an account of the picturesque retreat three years earlier: "Berneval is a tiny place consisting of a hotel and about twenty chalets: the people who come here are des bons bourgeois as far as I can see. The sea has a lovely beach, to which one descends through a small ravine, and the land is full of trees and flowers..."