The Camden Town Group in Context

Bought from the artist by Geoffrey Blackwell (1884–1943) in 1916; after his death in 1943 exhibited for sale at Arthur Tooth & Son, London, where purchased by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest in April 1943 and presented to Tate Gallery.

Ivy Cottage, Coldharbour: Sun and Snow is painted on a plain linen canvas with a pre-primed commercial white oil ground. It is stamped ‘H.J. Pursey, Shepherds Bush Rd, Hammersmith’. The smooth white ground is visible in areas such as the foreground.

It is very freely and confidently painted with linear brushstrokes drawing much of the composition. The application involves far fewer dabs of paint than in Pissarro’s earlier impressionist work. The paint is fluid with extended drips of paint drawn out across the surface. There is a greater variety of thickness from impasto to unpainted areas, but no glazing. Pissarro has used a narrow range of colours with pink and yellow sunlight falling on the snow and trees and cool blue shadows. He has drawn with paint in a strong dark blue expressive line, particularly evident in the foreground where there is much exposed ground, for instance the road gutter on the left is covered with the least amount of paint. There are few campaigns of colour application and a restrained and directed approach predictably achieving a less laboured result.

This work is varnished but stains from the varnish are visible on the reverse having penetrated through the cracks, suggesting it is not original. The work is in fairly good condition but the varnish detracts from the surface quality of the painting.

The impressionists had eagerly taken the opportunity to paint snow, which, because of their interest in varieties of weather conditions and natural colours, became a particular speciality. For example, in the winter of 1885 Camille Pissarro painted a group of snow scenes at Eragny, where Lucien, although mostly then based in Paris where he was making some of his first paintings and illustrations, often visited him. Camille also painted a snow scene in England in 1870 during Lucien’s first visit to the country (fig.1). Lucien did not paint snow particularly often: first in the winter of 1892 at Eragny, then in 1909–10 at Stamford Brook in west London, but then not again until four paintings, of which this is one, at Coldharbour in 1916. In Ivy Cottage, Coldharbour: Sun and Snow he also repeats another habit of the impressionists: depicting the sun full face low in the sky. It is partly hidden behind the branches of the fir tree at the left and is painted in thick impasto, surrounded by arcs of pink. The colours of the snow are striking, in blue and shades of pink and pinkish grey. A figure at the centre wearing a long coat with its collar up and a tight-fitting hat walks away up the hill.

The cottage at the left, which almost disappears behind ivy, is the ‘Ivy Cottage’ of the title, where the Pissarros lived from November 1915 to July the following year.1 Coldharbour, near Leith Hill, south of Dorking in Surrey, was another remote village rather like Fishpond in Dorset where Pissarro had stayed the year before, and was again close to steep hills. He painted the view from the hills, and painted snow again the following winter, when he was living at East Knoyle in Wiltshire. His friend J.B. Manson wrote to Pissarro about the effects of snow on 2 February 1914:

Geoffrey Blackwell (1884–1943), who bought this landscape when it was first exhibited the year it was made, was the principal collector of paintings by the impressionist Philip Wilson Steer (1860–1941), and amassed from 1909 a large group of his works. He had wanted to buy one of the Stamford Brook snow pictures by Pissarro in 1913, at the opening of his Carfax Gallery exhibition, but was put off by the price of 120 guineas, which was extraordinarily high even for a large painting.3 Manson was pushing for a sale, and Blackwell wrote back to him:

He invited Manson to lunch, and although he did not buy the painting this time he quickly bought this Coldharbour painting three years later. When writing about Blackwell’s collection in 1914, Manson concentrated inevitably on the Steers but added that ‘works of a different calibre or of different intention are being added’ to the collection, and then listed five Pissarros and reproduced two of them.5 The range of Blackwell’s collection was conservative, following Slade School staff and pupils and members of the New English Art Club, such as Henry Tonks, Augustus John, C.J. Holmes, George Clausen, Ambrose McEvoy and Glyn Philpot. Manson’s article mentions no other Camden Town Group artists as being part of the collection.

The recommendation for purchase of this painting was made by John Rothenstein, Director of the Tate Gallery, to the Royal Academy.6 The painting was singled out by John Cornforth in a review of the 1963 exhibition: ‘The dash and freedom of the Tate Gallery’s Ivy Cottage, Coldharbour: Sun and Snow is exceptional, and one wishes that he had painted more in this brilliant manner.’7

In 1988 the painting was lent to Chequers in Buckinghamshire, the official country house of the Prime Minister, following a request from Margaret Thatcher’s office for some modern British paintings to replace others that had had to be returned. It was retained by John Major, the next Prime Minister, but withdrawn when the Tate reviewed its loan policy in 1997.