Ivy Cottage, Coldharbour: Sun and Snow. Lucien Pissarro (1863-1944). 1916. Oil on canvas. H 53 x W 64.4 cm. Collection: Tate. Accession number NO5552; Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1943 Kindly made available on the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (CC BY-NC-ND).
Pissarro painted four snow scenes while living here, and this one was much praised By John Cornforth in the Country Life of 17 January 1963, after an exhibition that year: "The dash and freedom of the Tate Gallery’s Ivy Cottage, Coldharbour: Sun and Snow is exceptional, and one wishes that he had painted more in this brilliant manner" (qtd. in Jenkins; interestingly, the title of Cornforth's review was "A French Impressionist in England").
As the Tate's gallery label of August 2004 says, "In this landscape Pissarro is concerned with the play of light on snow, and contrasting tones." The early winter sunset seems to swirl just behind the tree on the left, tinting the snow with pink and yellow, gleaming fitfully on the blue shadows of the snow-banked road. A passer-by steps out briskly in the middle, a small figure below the roofs and trees with their wintry white coverings. It is a magical scene. — Jacqueline Banerjee
Related Material
Bibliography
Meadmore, William Sutton. Lucien Pissarro: Un Coeur Simple. New York: Knopf, 1963.
Catalogue Entry for Ivy Cottage, Coldharbour: Sun and Snow, 1916 (part of "The Camden Town Group in Context" project). Tate. Web. 14 August 2020.
Created 14 August 2020