Le Potager De Pissarro, Pontoise (Pissaro's Vegetable Garden, Pontoise) by Paul Cezanne

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Critical Study

Title: Le Potager De Pissarro, Pontoise (Pissaro’s Vegetable Garden, Pontoise)

Artist: Paul Cezanne

Date:  1877

Country of Origin: France

Size: height: 48.3 x width: 59.9 cm

Materials Used: Oil on canvas

This particular piece of Cezanne’s work was not commissioned by anyone but Cezanne himself for entertainment value as it is of Pissaro’s gardens, however recently it has been displayed at the Addison Fine Arts Gallery in New York.

The piece was produced during the movement of impressionism; impressionism is a light, spontaneous manner of painting which began in France as a reaction against the formalism of the dominant  style. Its naturalistic and down-to-earth treatment of its subjects has its roots in the French  of  and others. The movement's name came from Monet's early work, Impression: Sunrise, which was singled out for criticism by Louis Leroy on its exhibition. The hallmark of the style is the attempt to capture the subjective impression of light in a scene.

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Impressionist painters were considered radical in their time because they broke many of the rules of picture-making set by earlier generations. They found many of their subjects in life around them rather than in history, which was then the accepted source of subject matter. Instead of painting an ideal of beauty that earlier artists had defined, the impressionists tried to depict what they saw at a given moment, capturing a fresh, original vision that was hard for some people to accept as beautiful. They often painted out of doors, rather than in a studio, so that they could observe ...

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