Camille Pissarro - Garten und Hühnerstall von Octave Mirbeau, Les Damps (1892)

 

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The writer Octave Mirbeau, a close friend of Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, shared their enthusiasm for gardens. Pissarro painted the flower garden he designed in Les Damps in Normandy as a celebration of colors. This bourgeois idyll contrasts with Mirbeau's anti-authoritarian and anti-bourgeois writings.

In September 1892, Camille Pissarro spent two weeks as a guest at the country house of the writer Octave Mirbeau, located in Les Damps in the northern French department of Eure. Aside from his role as a novelist and playwright, Mirbeau had also distinguished himself as an art critic, particularly as a connoisseur of Impressionism. Like his colleague Claude Monet, Pissarro was also friends with Mirbeau and engaged in active correspondence with him. They were also united by a sympathy for the ideas of the anarchist movement, which they incorporated into their literary and artistic works.

During his stay with Mirbeau, Pissarro worked on four large-scale views of his house garden – a passion he shared with Monet, with whom he discussed modern horticultural issues. In Pissarro's portrayal, the garden's blossoming splendor appears in the bright light of an autumn afternoon. Bold accents in red, pink, rose, yellow, and orange stand out against the composition dominated by green. Motifs that suggest human presence – plant trellises and a chicken coop – recede into the background amidst the lush growth, with the narrow, pink-colored path on the right metaphorically and visually granting access to the viewer.

At the time of the painting's creation, the garden motif in Impressionist art had established itself as a symbol of perfect harmony between humans and nature – a core idea in anarchist literature, familiar to both Mirbeau and Pissarro. This idea was later picked up by representatives of Neo-Impressionism like Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross in their works. In March 1893, Pissarro's painting, along with his three other views of Mirbeau's garden, was exhibited in a large-scale solo show at the Parisian gallery of Paul Durand-Ruel, where they were presented under the title "Série de jardins."