Marketplace in Pontoise

Camille Pissarro French

Not on view

In the 1880s Camille Pissarro briefly experimented with the avant-garde dotted technique of Neo-Impressionism. To his son Lucien he wrote in December 1886: “I have done two ink drawings in dots…They came out not badly. Now if I could get them published in a review, that would bring in a few sous…The dot is still capable of frightening our charming bourgeois!” The uniform blackness of the dot technique naturally lent itself to printmaking, the patterns of dots mimicking the grainy surface of aquatints or the stippling of engravings. Yet, despite the popularity of dotted ink drawings, many of which were reproduced in contemporary journals, Pissarro never made prints using this idiosyncratic technique.

Marketplace in Pontoise, Camille Pissarro (French, Charlotte Amalie, Saint Thomas 1830–1903 Paris), Graphite, pen and black-gummed ink on buff wove paper (glossy on verso); right margin torn from notebook

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