Camille Pissarro, Waterworks of the Marly Machine at Bougival, 1871

In December 1870, with the help of a loan from friends of his neighbor Ludovic Piette, Camille Pissarro and his family sailed from the French port city Saint-Malo to England to escape the dangers of the Prussian invasion in Paris.¹ Although the time Pissarro spent in England was financially challenging, it proved to be a fertile period for the growth of ideas and the expansion of his subject matter.² While there, he took advantage of the opportunity to study English painting by artists such as John Constable (1776–1837) and Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), whose techniques for depicting the mechanization of water through locks, mills, weirs, and dams proved influential. These works, along with the industrial landscapes surrounding London, introduced Pissarro to new subject matter, inspiring his newfound interest in the expansion of France’s industrial suburbs through its waterways. Waterworks of the Marly Machine at Bougival was painted shortly after Pissarro’s return to France in 1871.

Water enacts a continual process of transformation and fluidity in the landscape, and its representation in painting showcases the artist’s deep understanding of how broader historical and geographical factors play a crucial role in shaping a specific location.³ The inclusion of rivers and waterways as an aspect of modernity in art—as opposed to the subject of the industrial landscape—has only more recently become the focus of academic study.⁴ Throughout the nineteenth century, France underwent a range of infrastructure projects aimed at transforming its river systems to meet the demands of an industrializing economy. Starting in 1838, the Seine River, in particular, underwent significant transformations as riverbeds were dredged, locks and dams were constructed to address its inconsistent depth and tendency to flood, and new canals were established to connect major river systems for the efficient transportation of goods.⁵ Improvements such as these in the fluvial section of the river completely revolutionized the system of traction and towage by horses, which was practically abandoned in France by the mid-nineteenth century, with steamers and small motorized boats using internal mechanization to self-propel up the river.⁶ These aspects of modern life would become a defining characteristic of Impressionist paintings in the 1870s, and the Waterworks of the Marly Machine at Bougival marks one of Pissarro’s first attempts at incorporating this theme into his own practice.⁷ In fact, it was one of at least twenty compositions featuring working aspects of the river that the artist realized in the two years after his trip to London, compared to only three that he had created before he left.⁸

The Nelson-Atkins painting depicts a stretch of the lower Seine in Bougival, a town located in the Yvelines department of the Île-de-France region in north-central France, about seventeen miles west of the center of Paris. Villages west of Paris, including Bougival, saw rapid and steady change at this time with the extension of the rail line, putting them within easy reach from the Gare Saint-Lazare (Saint-Lazare train station). Although Bougival was still somewhat rural, its proximity attracted bourgeois day-trippers who boated, promenaded, and dined there. Swimming was also popular at the local swimming hole, La Grenouillère, immortalized in paint by Pissarro’s contemporaries Claude Monet (1840–1926) and Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), who set up their easels there in the summer of 1869.⁹ In the Nelson-Atkins composition, however, Pissarro looks at the river through the lens of work rather than leisure. He includes a glimpse of the locks of Bougival at the right, in the midground; they were the first to be implemented as part of the canalization project for the Seine in 1838.¹⁰ These altered the flow of water into two channels around the Île de la Loge (Island of la Loge), seen on the opposite bank of Pissarro’s painting with the red-roofed house, and the Île Gautier, at the far right, home to the white mansard-roofed house.¹¹ To access these islands, one needed to traverse the Seine via a small boat, like several of those featured in Pissarro’s composition, two of which are being maneuvered by standing figures wielding a single oar. Most of the boats are working types, including a canoe moored to the black landing at left; a green Norwegian at center left, which may have been used for fishing; a double bachot to its right, which was used as a work boat for the French public works department, which managed the dam; and a single bachot at far right, which may have been used to ferry inhabitants of the islands across the Seine, which was not possible upstream of the dam.¹² In the foreground, Pissarro includes a prominent wooden rake-like structure which transects the river and the canvas from left to right. Known as a boom or estacade, it formed an extension of the “Marly Machine,” a remarkable hydraulic pumping system used to provide water uphill to the palace and gardens of Versailles during the late seventeenth century.¹³

Civil engineering has impacted this section of the river between the town of Bezons, about eight miles upstream of Bougival, and the Marly Machine since the 1680s. Engineered by Arnold de Ville and constructed by Rennequin Sualem (both Flemish natives) from 1681 to 1684 for King Louis XIV (1638–1715), the original Marly Machine consisted of fourteen waterwheels driven by the current of the Seine.¹⁴ These waterwheels powered more than 220 pumps that delivered water through a series of pumping stations, holding tanks, reservoirs, pipes, and mechanical linkages uphill to the Marly reservoir, which was 108 feet above Versailles (Fig. 1).¹⁵ In an effort to establish a waterhead powerful enough to achieve the maximum height at which the pump could move fluid against gravity, the Seine was divided into two arms by a series of islands and earth berms connected by timber or rock dikes. After a series of breakdowns and deteriorating parts, the machine was demolished in 1817. Rebuilt not long after with a smaller but still sizeable footprint, it remained an impressive site and became a tourist destination, including for artists like Turner, who visited several times in the 1820s and 1830s and completed a series of watercolor sketches there (Fig. 2). By Pissarro’s era, the Marly Machine was run by a hydraulic system engineered by Xavier Dufrayer in 1859.¹⁶ In Turner’s watercolor, we see a picture-postcard view of the machine in the distance while a group of bourgeois tourists alight on the banks, possibly awaiting passage across the river in one of the boats. Here, the machine becomes a part of the river landscape, in harmony with its surroundings, and the focus is more on the leisure activity of the individuals rather than the machine as a working mechanism for disciplining the river.

Pissarro included the Marly Machine, or aspects of it, in at least two other compositions, including The Marly Hydraulic Works at Bougival (current location unknown),¹⁷ painted in 1869 before the artist’s prolonged exposure to Turner and Constable. This work features the machine in the distance, with the river relegated to a minor role at the left edge of the composition, and two individuals walking along its banks toward the machine. The second painting, Banks of the Seine at Bougival, was completed in 1872 after Pissarro’s return from London (Fig. 3). Its composition recalls Turner’s work, but it highlights the river as a commercial artery, with its barges and factories that line the banks. In the Nelson-Atkins composition, Pissarro chose a less-than-picturesque vantage point of the Marly Machine, looking southeast from the quai Rennequin-Sualem, named after the machine’s original builder. In contrast to the two other works featuring the Marly Machine, here Pissarro eliminates the pumphouse all together, focusing instead on a working aspect of the pump itself—designed to protect the wheels of the machine from floating objects and to prevent boats from navigating too close to the pump. A near-contemporaneous work by the English artist Alfred Sisley (born Paris, 1839–99), helps situate the boom in relation to the pumphouse (Fig. 4), and it also includes the gate on the boom seen at the far right of Pissarro’s composition. In Sisley’s painting, the gate is closed; however, in the Nelson-Atkins composition, it is open. The gate allowed people to walk out on the boom where they could fish, as seen in another work by Sisley painted around the same time (ca. 1876; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Also note the figure on the boom that Pissarro painted out of his finished composition (Fig. 14 in the accompanying technical entry by Becca Goodman). It is possible that Pissarro set up his easel close to the Marly Machine, just to the left of the boom in Sisley’s painting, but compressed the space somewhat, looking toward the end of the Île de la Loge at left and the Île Gautier at right.¹⁸ The locks of Bougival were in between these islands. A period map provides greater clarity; a red “x” marks where this author believes that Pissarro placed his easel (Fig. 5). The black dashed line to the left of the Marly Machine represents the city boundaries and indicates that the Marly Machine falls somewhat confusingly within the confines of Bougival. Thus, given the position of the boom and the artist’s vantage point, the painting represents Bougival, despite much historical debate.¹⁹

Pissarro started this work with an underdrawing in what is possibly charcoal and a fluid medium on the canvas.²⁰ The painting showcases his ability to capture the dynamic interplay of light and shadow as rays of sun make their way through a temperamental sky. The fractured colors of the water’s surface, with dashes of blue, green, white, and red, reflect the houses and foliage on the opposite banks, creating a vivid impression of outdoor light. One also sees the artist’s facture through his use of broken brushwork of varying lengths and thicknesses in the animated strokes of water at midground. The variety of his paint handling is also visible in the scrubby upright poplars, with their haphazard brushstrokes made in left and right upward wisps that convey their texture. With the unruly branches in place, Pissarro added patches of sky to open up the trees.²¹ His sky, with its turbulent clouds rendered in wet-into-wet swirls of white, blue, dark gray, and hints of pink, is equally varied with brushwork in every direction, as if to indicate the clouds’ movement across the picture plane. The artist’s technical approach, in concert with his subject of the river and its mechanization, call to mind the work of Constable, whom Pissarro and Monet studied during their forced sojourn to England. Pissarro later recalled: “We used to go to the museum. The watercolors of Turner, as well as the works of John Constable, certainly had their effect on us. . . . We were particularly taken by the landscapists who were nearer to what we were seeking in ‘plein air,’ light and fleeting effects.”²²

Indeed, Pissarro may have been inspired by Constable’s full-scale study for his six-foot canvas, The Leaping Horse, which was on view at the Victoria and Albert Museum when Pissarro was in London (Fig. 6). Its characteristically English sky, as Malcolm Warner poetically writes, evokes “the promise of rain or rain to come.”²³ Constable’s painting depicts traffic on the River Stour, specifically the Float Bridge or Float Jump, with a sluice and a small wooden bridge and barrier.²⁴ While these six-footers were completed in his studio due to their size, they were built up from multiple sketches made en plein air and thus communicated a direct link to nature, as Pissarro’s canvas does. Constable’s paint application was varied, like Pissarro’s, and he “piled up or scraped down, aggressively jabbed or lightly and precisely touched, scratched with the end of a brush, splattered and smeared” his paint across the surface of his canvas, as Jonathan Clarkson has described it.²⁵ Constable used this varied brushwork to recreate the textures he saw in nature, adding to the mood of his completed works. As the title of Constable’s painting suggests, the subject is a horse leaping over a small wooden bridge. The horse would have been used to pull small boats through the locks, and it is seen jumping over the three-foot-high bridge that serves as a crossing between Essex and Suffolk. The barrier kept cattle from straying but allowed barge traffic to continue. This mechanized subject of river traffic clearly held great interest for Constable, as did the boom in the foreground of the Nelson-Atkins painting, which Pissarro would realize immediately after returning home to France in the summer of 1871.

Notes

1. Ralph E. Shikes and Paula Harper, Pissarro, His Life and Work (New York: Horizon, 1980), 88.

2. In a letter to his friend Théodore Duret in June 1871, Pissarro wrote, “En fait d’affaires, de vente, je n’ai rien fait, excepté Durand-Ruel qui m’a acheté deux petits tableaux. Ma peinture ne mord pas, mais pas du tout, cela me poursuit un peu partout” (In terms of business, sales, I did nothing, except Durand-Ruel who bought from me two small paintings. My painting does not bite, no, not at all; it pursues me everywhere); Janine Bailly-Herzberg, Correspondance de Camille Pissarro (Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône, France: Éditions du Valhermeil, 2003), 1:64n9. All translations are by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan unless otherwise noted.

3. Stephen Daniels expresses this idea in his article “Liquid Landscape: Southam, Constable, and the Art of the Pond,” British Art Studies 10 (November 29, 2018): https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-10/sdaniels.

4. These topics find new form through an ecocritical lens in more recent scholarship, including a thoughtful work by Genevieve Westerby, “Pissarro at Pontoise: Picturing Infrastructure and the Changing Riverine Environment,” Athanor 39 (2022): 155–70. See also Maura Coughlin, “Biotopes and Ecotones: Slippery Images on the Edge of the French Atlantic,” Landscapes: The Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language 7, no. 1 (2016): 1–23; and John Ribner, “The Poetics of Pollution,” in Turner, Whistler, Monet: Impressionist Visions, ed. Katharine Lochnan (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2004), 51–63.

5. Sir Edward Thorpe, The Seine: From Havre to Paris (London: Macmillan, 1913), 19–23.

6. Thorpe, Seine, 24.

7. Richard Thomson is among the first scholars to acknowledge this point. See his Camille Pissarro: Impressionism Landscape and Rural Labour, exh. cat. (London: South Bank Centre, 1990), 19. Pissarro painted The Weir at Pontoise (ca. 1868; private collection) with a number of barges on the opposite shore. He repeated the motif with subtle changes around 1872, after his return from London: Camille Pissarro, The Lock at Pontoise, 1872, Cleveland Museum of Art, https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1990.7.

8. Paintings created before the artist’s trip to London: The Weir at Pontoise (1868; private collection, CR 129); The Marly Hydraulic Works at Bougival (1869; current location unknown, CR 132); The Seine at Bougival (1870; Bridgestone Museum of Art, Ishibashi Foundation, CR 154). Paintings created in the two years after his trip to London: The Seine at Bougival (1871; private collection, Switzerland, CR 200); Banks of the Seine at Bougival (1871; stolen in the Netherlands, 1993, CR 201); Barges on the Seine at Bougival (1871; private collection, CR 202); Banks of the River (1871; private collection, CR 204); The Seine at Port-Marly, The Wash-House (1872; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, CR 229); Banks of the Seine at Bougival (1872; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, CR 234); The Seine at Port-Marly (1872; private collection, UK, CR 236); The Weir at Pontoise (1872; Cleveland Museum of Art, CR 243); The Weir and the Lock at Saint-Quen-l’Aumône (1872; private collection, CR 244); Banks of the Oise at Pontoise (1872; private collection, Chicago, CR 249); View of Pontoise, the Timber Raft (1872; private collection, CR 250); Banks of the Oise, Pontoise (1872; private collection, CR 251); Banks of the Oise near Pontoise (1872; private collection, CR 274); Road on the Banks of the Oise, Pontoise (1872; private collection, CR 275); Factory at St Quen-l’Aumône, the Flood of the Oise (1873; private collection, CR 297); Factory at Saint-Quen-l’Aumône (1873; Springfield [MA] Museum of Fine Arts, CR 298); Factory on the Banks of the Oise, Saint-Quen-l’Aumône (1873; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, CR 299); Factory on the Banks of the Oise, Saint-Quen-l’Aumône (1873; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, CR 300); The Factory on the Banks of the Oise, Épluches (1873; private collection, CR 302); Route d’Auvers on the Banks of the Oise, Pontoise (1873; Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, CR 303).

9. See, for example, Claude Monet, La Grenouillère, 1869, Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437135.

10. Thorpe, Seine, 20.

11. Mont Valérien, occupied by the Prussian Army Corps during the Franco-Prussian War just months before Pissarro’s return, is visible in the distance beyond the houses of Croissy. Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts identified this and several other architectural and geographical features in the canvas in their 2005 catalogue raisonné. See Pissarro and Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro: Critical Catalogue of Paintings (Paris: Wildenstein Institute Publications, 2005), no. 203, p. 2:173.

12. I am extremely grateful for the assistance of Frederic Delaive, associate researcher at the Tempora Laboratory, Rennes 2 University, and president of the Carré des canotiers. Delaive to Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, NAMA, February 22, and 25–26, 2023, NAMA curatorial files. The sketchy nature of the figures in these boats makes it difficult to determine their costume; however, Jean-Louis Lenhof, professor at Université de Caen-Normandiem, feels that at least those in the green boat appear in the bourgeois attire of shirtsleeves and waistcoats, rather than the overalls or plain shirts worn by manual workers. I am thankful for clarifying exchanges with him. Lenhof to Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, NAMA, February 14, 2023, NAMA curatorial files.

13. For information on the Marly Machine and the king’s garden, see Ian Thompson, The Sun King’s Garden: Louis XIV, André Le Nôtre and the Creation of the Gardens of Versailles (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 251.

14. General information on the Marly Machine has been extracted from Bruno Bentz and Éric Soullard, “La Machine de Marly,” Château de Versailles: De l’Ancien régime à nos jours, no. 1 (April/June 2011): 73–77. For more specifics on the early history of the machine, as well as excellent diagrams, see L. A. Barbet, Les grandes eaux de Versailles: Installations mécaniques et étangs artificiels, description des fontaines et de leurs origins (Paris: H. Dunod et E. Pinat, 1907), 95–126.

15. For further details, see Thompson, The Sun King’s Garden, 247–51; and Jacques Laÿ and Monique Läy, Louveciennes: Histoire et rencontres (Paris: Éditions Riveneuve, 2016), 46–51.

16. This was eventually replaced by electromechanical pumps in 1968, which continued to draw water from the river.

17. Pissarro and Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro: Critical Catalogue of Paintings, no. 132, p. 2:124.

18. I am grateful to Benjamin Ringot, Centre de recherche du château de Versailles, and Jacque Läy, independent historian, and his son Xavier Läy for their help and supplemental images, maps, and photographs in an effort to pinpoint Pissarro’s location. See Ringot and Läy to Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, NAMA, February 13–15, 2023, NAMA curatorial files.

19. See the respective provenance and bibliography sections for this painting completed by Danielle Hampton Cullen. When the painting appeared in the sale of George Feydou in 1903, it was listed as a scene of Pontoise; however, when it was sold in 1933 from Galerie Étienne Bignou to Kunsthandel Paul Cassirer in Amsterdam, it was called The Port of Marly. In 1959, when it was exhibited at Wildenstein Gallery in New York, it appeared as The Banks of the Seine at Bougival. It was also Bougival in both Pissarro catalogues raisonnés (1939 and 2005). See Ludovic Rodo Pissarro and Lionello Venturi, Camille Pissarro, Son Art—Son Œuvre (Paris: Paul Rosenberg, 1939), no. 125, pp. 1:97, 2: unpaginated, reproduced as Barrage sur la Seine a [sic] Bougival; and Pissarro and Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro: Critical Catalogue of Paintings, no. 203, p. 2:173. However, in 2007, Richard Brettell noted two verso inscriptions on the painting’s paper backing that read “Au bord de la Seine à Port Marly” (Banks of the Seine at Port Marly), which he argued was “probably more accurate than its traditional title, Weir on the Seine at Bougival.” See Richard R. Brettell and Joachim Pissarro, Manet to Matisse: Impressionist Masters from the Marion and Henry Bloch Collection, exh. cat. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2007), 51.

20. See the accompanying technical entry by Becca Goodman.

21. See the accompanying technical entry by Goodman.

22. Wynford Dewhurst, Impressionist Painting: Its Genesis and Development (London: G. Newnes, 1904), 31–32.

23. Malcolm Warner and Julia Marciari Alexander, This Other Eden: Paintings from the Yale Center for British Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 138.

24. Although not formally accessioned into the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection until 1900, the full-scale study for Constable’s The Leaping Horse, ca. 1825, was on view there since 1862.

25. Jonathan Clarkson, Constable (London: Phaidon, 2010), 211.

Ignoring the Marly Machine behind him, Pissarro painted this east-facing scene of the Seine on canvas tensioned to a five-member stretcher with a vertical crossbar. The overall dimensions of the work correspond to a standard-format no. 8 paysage (46 x 33 cm), but the canvas and stretcher have been modified to meet these dimensions. Sometime before 1966 or 1967,¹ the original tacking margins were removed, and the painting was lined. The painting was tensioned to the stretcher; then, a wood strip was secured to the top tacking margin to extend the height of the painting. Fill material and retouching were added over the exposed lining fabric and a small sliver of the wood strip to marry them to the original work. Brown paper tape was subsequently applied to all the edges (Fig. 7). Compared to the overall size of the work, which is 32.9 x 46.0 cm, the original painted area measures approximately 31.6 x 45.1 cm, a difference of 1.3 cm in height and 1 cm in width.

The stretcher appears old, but it is not clear if it is original (reused after the lining) or a replacement. While it bears numerous labels and markings, the majority are found on top of the brown paper associated with the lining and therefore postdate that treatment. There are some markings on the wood itself, but there is not enough historical information to date them.

It is also difficult to estimate how much canvas was cropped during the lining process. Pissarro did not always paint to the edge of the picture plane, and he sometimes left exposed ground that created irregular borders.² In Waterworks, uninterrupted brushstrokes continue onto the white ground on all edges (except possibly the top, which is obscured with fill and retouching), suggesting the canvas was flat, not folded around a stretcher, when they were applied (Fig. 8). In other words, the white ground along the perimeter of the composition appears to be part of the original picture plane rather than part of the tacking margins. Despite the presence of these uninterrupted peripheral brushstrokes, most of the paint ends in an atypical straight edge that corresponds to the inner edge of the paper tape (Fig. 9). It is possible but unlikely that Pissarro initially painted on unstretched canvas, then stretched it before completing the painting. This would have achieved the two types of edges, but the hard edge is not characteristic of paint pushed over a turnover edge. Instead, the straight edge looks as if it were formed by masking off the perimeter of the piece during painting and subsequently removing the masking, leaving a precise, raised lip of paint. With no literature or examples to suggest that the Impressionists masked the edges of their works, the most likely scenario is that overpaint was added after the brown tape was adhered along the edges. While the lack of paint on top of the paper is confusing, the paper may have been replaced or a thin second layer may have been added to cover stray brushstrokes. If this is the case, much of the paint near the edges may be later retouching, but because it is similar in age and medium to the original paint, it is not easily detectable at normal viewing distance in visible light, under ultraviolet radiation, or with infrared radiation. Examination under magnification supports this theory, as an upper layer of paint near the top edge contains a red ocher not used elsewhere in the sky, and it is delaminating from what is likely the surface of the original paint film (Fig. 10).

The canvas was prepared with a white ground layer, which is visible around the perimeter where the brown tape has been removed. It also peeks through the paint layers in parts of the sky and middle ground. The ground appears warm in color because it is covered with remnants of a thin, discolored layer of varnish (Fig. 11).

Underdrawing is visible on top of the ground layer. The black, splintery, unbound medium is visually consistent with charcoal (Fig. 12). In at least one instance (directly under the door of the leftmost building), the charcoal seems to have been mixed or reinforced with dilute umber paint (Fig. 13). Pissarro’s use of fluid underdrawing medium is well documented, although it was usually comprised of dry pigment and blue paint.³ The major elements were then blocked in with paint, often leaving the ground exposed between the shapes.

Using thick paint with low impasto, Pissarro built up the surface with various brushes and techniques. The broad strokes in the gate were formed by a much larger brush than the thin strokes comprising the shutters of the building. Pissarro applied paint wet-into-wet, blending it to mirror the swirling water. Once the paint was slightly dry, he scraped, drybrushed, and scumbled to achieve various textures. The shadows under the roof of the leftmost building, for example, are drybrushed.

Despite his preparatory steps, the artist made significant changes after the initial painting session. At first, Pissarro painted a figure walking on the boom. The figure was planned, as evidenced by a halo of exposed ground surrounding it (which is visible using transmitted imaging techniques). After the piece was allowed to dry, Pissarro painted out the figure. He seems to have made changes to the structure on the left of the figure, and he may have eliminated a boat on the right (Fig. 14). These sections are especially textured with some evidence of scraping and repainting (Fig. 15). Additionally, Pissarro painted out the original gate and part of the boom at the right side of the work and repositioned them to their current locations. (Fig. 16).

Other minor changes were also painted wet-over-dry, such as the reduction in size of the tree grouping at the right edge and the shape of the boat beneath them. Pissarro applied sky blue over the edges of the roofs and trees in the middle ground to refine contours. He used the same color on top of the trees: the sky that seems to be visible through the trees is actually applied on top of them. There is a single incised line above the current gate. Since it is the only one, it is likely the result of an accidental scuff incurred while the paint was still tacky rather than an artifact of an artist-made change.

The last details were added wet-over-dry near the end of the painting process. At least one figure was painted over steep, dry peaks of paint (Fig. 17), and the thin, fluid paint used for the signature and date pooled in the low points of the underlying brushstrokes (Fig. 18).

The lining is beginning to delaminate at the top edge. The impasto has been permanently affected by the heat and pressure of the lining campaign, and it now appears slightly flattened and rounded. There is an overall network of mechanical cracks, but the paint is stable and secure. Significant retouching (overpaint) is present at the perimeter of the painting, and in some areas of the sky, the retouching extends two inches into the picture plane (see Fig. 10). At some point in the past, a yellowed natural resin varnish was removed, leaving some residue in the interstices of the paint and exposed ground (see Fig. 11). Today, a synthetic coating applied prior to the painting’s acquisition remains on the surface.

Notes

1. Swiss customs stamps were placed on top of the brown paper associated with the lining. If these are entry stamps, the painting must have been lined before it arrived in Zurich in 1966; if they are exit stamps, the painting must have been lined before it left Zurich in 1967.

2. For a clear, contemporary example by Pissarro, see the right edge and lower left corner of Fox Hill, Upper Norwood (1870; National Gallery, London), https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/camille-pissarro-fox-hill-upper-norwood. Although they were painted much later than Waterworks, the same technique is visible around the edges of two other pieces in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, The Market at Pontoise (1895), https://doi.org/10.37764/78973.5.648.2088 and Rue Saint-Honoré, Sun Effect, Afternoon (1898), https://doi.org/10.37764/78973.5.650.2088.

3. Mary Schafer, “Camille Pissarro, The Market at Pontoise (or The Market at Gisors), 1895,” technical entry in this catalogue, https://doi.org/10.37764/78973.5.648.2088. See also Alex Chipkin et al., “Woman Washing Her Feet in a Brook (1894),” in Paintings by the Pissarro Family: A Technical Catalogue (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, 2024), https://pissarro.discovernewfields.org/technical-reports/48.17/.