Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College

The Human Comedy: Chronicles of 19th-Century France

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195415.jpg

195415.jpg

Camille Pissarro (French, 1830–1903) Vegetable Market at Pontoise, 1891 Etching Gift of the Oberlin College Art Library, 1954.15

Throughout his career, Camille Pissaro depicted scenes of rural life and sociability such as this view of a market day in the village of Pontoise in the northwestern suburbs of Paris. The intimacy of rural and suburban forms of community seen in this print contrast sharply with the anonymity of bustling Parisian crowds in Pissarro’s painting of le Pont Neuf (on view in the King Sculpture Court) or the alienation increasingly associated at the time with urban living (see Pierre Bonnard’s House in a Courtyard hanging nearby).

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