Red Roofs, Corner of a Village, Winter by Camille Pissarro was created in 1877. The painting is in Musee d’Orsay Paris. The size of the work is 54 x 65 cm and is made of oil on canvas.
The title, Red roofs, corner of a village, winter, makes clear the theoretical dimension of this work by Camille Pissarro. In this painting he in fact moves away from an anecdotal idea of landscape.
The planes are in parallel succession on the surface of the canvas. So the impression of depth is rendered simply by the decreasing size of the subjects. The slopes of the roofs, varying from orange-red to brown, seem to spread across the whole surface. The same tones can be found in the fields and plants in the foreground, as well as on the Côte St Denis in the background. The thick impasto catches the light, and makes the brushstrokes vibrant, conferring a great intensity and feeling of movement on the painted surface.
This painting dates from the time after 1865 when Pissarro and Cézanne used to work together on the same subject. But Cézanne’s version, The Orchard, Côte St Denis, at Pontoise (on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts, Saint Petersburg, Florida) offers a view from higher up. The houses and roofs disappear behind a curtain of trees, and the effects of the colours are limited by this intrusive vegetation… Read more in Musee d’Orsay
