Rue de l'Epicerie, Rouen (Effect of Sunlight)
Camille Pissarro painted this street in Rouen in 1898, on a Friday, when the market filled it. He painted the view three times and this is the only one of the three with the market under way. The Metropolitan Museum of Art bought it in 1960.
- 1898
- Oil on canvas
About Camille Pissarro
What the painting shows
The viewer stands above the street, looking down it. The bottom third of the canvas is market: awnings in cream and green, a red parasol, trestles of produce, and a crowd packed shoulder to shoulder in dark coats and pale hats. Individual faces are a stroke each.
Above the crowd the houses close in on both sides, plaster and pale stone under orange tile roofs, with painted shop signs in red, blue and white hung flat against the upper walls. Behind the roofs the towers of Rouen cathedral rise into a blue sky, their stone cut with tracery open enough to show daylight through it.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's audio guide places the market on the Place de la Haute-Vieille-Tour, with the cathedral standing behind. The canvas is signed and dated at lower left, C. Pissarro 1898.
He found the spot by walking
This was Camille Pissarro's fourth stay in Rouen, and the Met's curatorial note says he already knew the city's subjects by the time he arrived. What he did not have was a place to work from. He wrote to his eldest son, Lucien, on 19 August 1898.
“Yesterday I found an excellent place from which I can paint the rue de l'Epicerie and even the market, a really interesting one, which takes place every Friday.”
Most of his late city paintings were made from rented rooms above the street, and the museums that hold them usually name the hotel. For this picture the Met names neither hotel nor window. What it records is the letter, and a vantage point he went out and found.
Three canvases, one market
Pissarro painted the rue de l'Epicerie three times. The Met states that its picture is the only one of the three that shows the market actually in progress, which is what he had gone looking for: the market ran on Fridays, so the subject existed one day in seven.
Related canvases of the street are in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and at Newfields in Indianapolis, which has published a technical report on its version, accession 79.283.
Why the canvas stands upright
At 81.3 by 65.1 centimetres this is a tall picture, not a wide one. The boulevard series he had been painting in Paris runs the other way, long and horizontal, because a boulevard is long and horizontal. A narrow street with a cathedral at the end of it is neither.
The Met's audio guide raises the obvious comparison, Claude Monet, who had painted the same cathedral in a long series of canvases. The difference is in what gets the room. Here the cathedral is scenery at the top of the picture and the market has the foreground.
Timeline
1898
Pissarro's fourth stay in Rouen. The Metropolitan Museum of Art records that he already knew the city's subjects by then.
19 August 1898
Writes to his son Lucien that he has found a place to paint the rue de l'Epicerie and the Friday market.
1898
Painted; signed and dated lower left.
1960
Bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, accession 60.5, with a gift from Mr. and Mrs. Richard J. Bernhard.
Frequently asked questions
What is happening in Rue de l'Epicerie, Rouen?
It is market day. The crowd filling the lower part of the picture is the Friday market at Rouen, which Camille Pissarro had written to his son about a few days before he began. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns the painting, says this is the only one of his three canvases of the street that shows the market in progress.
Where is the street in the painting?
In Rouen, in Normandy, north-west of Paris. The Met's audio guide places the market on the Place de la Haute-Vieille-Tour, at the end of the rue de l'Epicerie, with Rouen cathedral behind it.
Is the church in the background Rouen cathedral?
Yes. The towers above the roofline belong to Rouen cathedral, the same building Claude Monet painted in his own series of canvases. Camille Pissarro keeps it in the background and gives the front of the picture to the market stalls.
Did Pissarro paint it from a hotel window?
The museum does not say. Camille Pissarro's Paris series of these years were painted from rented rooms above the street, and the holding museums usually name the hotel, but the Met names no hotel and no window for this picture. His letter says only that he had found an excellent place to paint from.
How big is the painting?
81.3 by 65.1 centimetres, and upright rather than wide — the reverse of the long horizontal boulevard scenes Camille Pissarro was painting in Paris in the same years.
Where can I see it?
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, in the European Paintings department. The museum bought it in 1960 and it carries the accession number 60.5.
