The Banks of the Marne in Winter

Download1686 × 1021 px View on a wall Edit

Artist: Camille Pissarro (French, 1830–1903)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 91.8 × 150.2 cm (36 1/8 × 59 1/8 in.); Framed: 119.7 × 178.5 × 10.2 cm (47 1/8 × 70 1/4 × 4 in.)
Museum: Art Institute of Chicago
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

This painting of a rural winter landscape is resolutely un-picturesque. Its dark color palette is uninterrupted by any majestic natural elements, such as towering trees or a glittering pond. Even early in his career, Camille Pissarro subverted traditional landscape painting by deliberately diverging from the pastoral scenes of his mentor, Camille Corot.

In this large, rectangular canvas, Pisarro applied paint heavily, often using a palette knife, in emulation of Gustave Courbet, whose work is on view nearby. Just a few years after he made this work, Pissarro adopted a more immediate approach to landscape painting, working en plein air (outdoors) directly from nature rather than in a studio, a technique closely associated with the Impressionists.

Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0.