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Description: signed with monogram and dated 1925

oil on canvas

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Dimensions: 45.5 by 54.5cm., 18 by 21 1/2 in.

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Provenance: The Artist's family, May 1949

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Published: Anne Thorold, A Catalogue of the Paintings of Lucien Pissarro, Athelney Books, London, 1983, no.399, p.179, illustrated.

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Notes: Painted in February 1925 when the artist and his wife Esther were staying at Bandol, in the south of France, with M. Marcillas, before moving on to the village Le Brusq a few miles further east. Lucien painted five pictures in this small town on the Riviera coast, situated between Marseilles and Toulon, and finshed another group at Le Brusq by June: the area was a productive source of inspiration (see also lot 47). The view over the steep terraces here looks south towards the Mediterranean, with the characteristic red-tile pitched roofs providing the central focus, set within a gap between two separate tree breaks and rising from a cloud of almond blossom.The eye is drawn satisfyingly towards the heart of the composition by the curves of the low dry-stone buttresses.

The present work is also known by the title Amandiers, Temps Gris, which underlines an important point as to Pissarro's working methods. John Bensusan-Butt has commented that in looking through Thorold's catalogue, it is interesting to see "how the products of each painting season divide themselves into grey weather or sunny subjects, morning and afternoon or evening". Lucien was a diligent plein-airist, selecting "out-of-the-way places (rather than artists' colonies for example) [as] one way of working undisturbed". Thus he was meticulous in on-the-spot notation, although changing climatic conditions in the early note-making stages could be happily seized upon to new, and final, effect: a painterly response permitting a bush bursting into flower to be regarded as a 'piece of luck' (intro., Anne Thorold, op.cit., p.xv). While Lucien's famous father Camille had never painted in Provence, the area played a notable part in his own work. Although the colours of the south were hot and intense, requiring some adaptation from years of English practice, the light was more stable and allowed for full contemplation, absorption and evolution of a subject such as Les Terrasses, with minimal interruption.