Provenance
(sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 18 February 1878, no. 59, as _La Haie_); purchased by Georges de Bellio [1828-1894];[1] by inheritance to his daughter, Mme Ernest Donop de Monchy [née Victorine de Bellio, 1863-1958] until at least 1937. (Paul Rosenberg et Cie., Paris) and (César de Hauke, Paris), by 1939.[2] Arthur Goldsmith, Paris; sold 1955 to (Walter Feilchenfeldt, Zurich);[3] sold that same year to (Georges Seligmann, Inc., New York); sold 1955 to Paul Mellon [1907-1999], Upperville, Virginia; gift 1985 to NGA.
[1] The painting is no. 104 in the inventory of the de Bellio collection, published by Remus Niculescu in _Paragone_ 249 (November 1970): 68.
[2] According to Ludovic Rodo Pissarro and Lionello Venturi, _Camille Pissarro. Son Art--Son Oeuvre_, 2 vols., San Francisco, 1989 (reprint of 1939 edition): no. 135.
[3] Goldsmith and Feilchenfeldt per Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, _Pissarro: Critical Catalogue of Paintings_, 3 vols., Milan, Paris, and New York, 2005: 2:no. 231.
Accession Number
1985.64.31
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
overall: 37.8 x 45.7 cm (14 7/8 x 18 in.) | framed: 54.3 x 63.2 x 5 cm (21 3/8 x 24 7/8 x 1 15/16 in.)
Classification
Painting
Credit Line
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon
Tags
Painting Impressionist & Modern (1851–1900) Oil Painting Canvas French
Background & Context
Background Story
The Fence (1872) represents Pissarro's engagement with the structured rural landscape of Pontoise, where fences, hedgerows, and field divisions created the geometric patterns of working farmland. The fence—a simple wooden barrier dividing one section of landscape from another—provided Pissarro with a compositional device that organized the painting's spatial structure while documenting the agricultural landscape's characteristic form. Fences in rural France marked property boundaries, contained livestock, and defined the spatial organization that agricultural practice required. Pissarro's treatment of the fence demonstrates his ability to find formal interest in the most ordinary rural structures—the barrier's vertical posts and horizontal rails create a grid that interacts with the landscape's natural forms, producing compositional tensions between geometry and organic growth. The year 1872 places this during Pissarro's most productive Pontoise period, when the landscape's every feature—fences, fields, trees, and buildings—served his artistic investigation. The painting also reflects Pissarro's anarchist convictions: the fence, marking property and exclusion, could be read as a symbol of the social boundaries that limited freedom—yet Pissarro's treatment is observational rather than polemical, recording the fence's visual and practical reality without commentary.
Cultural Impact
Pissarro's paintings of rural structures influenced how the French agricultural landscape's material culture was represented in art, documenting fences, barns, and working structures that conventional landscape painting often omitted. The paintings influenced later French painters who similarly attended to rural infrastructure, and influenced how agricultural landscape was understood as a cultural rather than purely natural product. The fence subject influenced how property and boundary were visually represented in French rural painting.
Why It Matters
This painting matters because it demonstrates how even the most ordinary rural structures can serve artistic purposes—organizing composition, documenting material culture, and implicitly raising questions about property and boundary that connect rural landscape to social philosophy. Pissarro's fence is both a practical object and a symbol, and his treatment allows both readings without forcing either.
