The Fan Mount: Three female workers gather crops from fields that are surmounted by cumulus clouds and surrounded by low-lying rounded trees. At left, a church rises above what appear to be several houses, perhaps a small village. While the two women at left appear to be collecting cabbages, at right, the woman toils alone, bending down low to the field of pea plants with what appears to be a hand hoe. The two women at left face each other and are in close enough proximity to be in conversation, though the figure at furthest left looks down toward the cabbage she holds. All three women wear kerchiefs around their hair (blue, coral, and white, from left to right). While the two at left are both dressed in blue, the bending figure at right has a tan skirt, blue long-sleeved top, and a raw sienna cloth bulging from and attached to the rear of her waist, which may well represent a bag filled with collected peapods. The design for her skirt reaches beyond the inner curved contour of the fan shape, where we can see the continuation of the skirt in translucent gray gouache. As with a number of Pissarro’s farming scenes, the composition is laid out in a series of bands from foreground to background. Here, it moves from the darker green of the pea shoots and dark blue-green of the cabbages in the foreground to a lighter green of the field beyond into grays of the recessed landscape, and finally to the light blue sky and white clouds. The arched shape of the fan-mount provides an expansive sense of the fields extending as far as the eye can see.
Pissarro’s Fans of 1879: Camille Pissarro strongly embraced fan-mount painting at the encouragement of his friend Edgar Degas, so much so that he produced more fans than Degas ever did. Over the years, Pissarro created—at most recent count—about seventy fans from about 1878 to 1895 (Adler 1992) to Degas’s leaner production, which—at most recent count—hovers at twenty-seven or slightly more examples. Pissarro took up the format in 1878 or 1879 and continued throughout the rest of his life, although he made significantly fewer from 1890 on. The first twelve of these were exhibited at the fourth Impressionist exhibition in Paris from April to May of 1879, where Degas showed five fans of his own. Degas had hoped to cajole his fellow fan-painting enthusiasts into creating a room devoted to the subject; however, the final exhibition dispersed the fans of those who contributed them throughout the exhibition, as fewer artists participated in the genre than Degas had contacted about the potential gallery. (For more on these plans, see the catalogue entry for Degas’s
Fan Mount: The Ballet,
29.100.554.)
Mary Cassatt and Louisine Elder Havemeyer: The current fan has been identified by both Gerstein (1978)—who describes it as probably so—and Adler (1992)—who is more definitive—as the fan that the artist Mary Cassatt lent to the 1879 Impressionist exhibition under the title "Cueillette de petits pois" (or, Harvesting Peas). While Pickvance (1986) associates number two hundred in the fourth Impressionist exhibition with a fan that was exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1978 as
Fan: Harvesting Peas, then lent anonymously,[1] that fan is identified in the 1978 exhibition catalogue as watercolor on vellum and dated as from about 1880, potentially after the date of the fourth Impressionist exhibition. It stayed in Cassatt’s collection until after her death, when her grandnephew Anthony Drexel Cassatt selected that fan as his one work of art to be bequeathed to him from the artist. Unfortunately, that fan is not illustrated in the 1978 catalogue and was not included in Pissarro and Venturi’s 1939 catalogue raisonné of Pissarro’s works. However, it appears to be the fan entitled elsewhere as “Les Vendanges” (private collection), which has been identified in Sotheby’s May 8, 2014 Impressionist & Modern Art day sale, no. 211, as a gouache (similar to and often confused with watercolor) on vellum gift from the artist dated about 1880 and formerly in the collection of Mary Cassatt and by descent to Minnie Cassatt Hickman. Hickman was Anthony Drexel Cassatt’s daughter, so it is quite likely that this fan is the same as the work Pickvance associated with the 1879 exhibition. Interestingly, rather than “Vendanges”—a word that can be translated as “harvest” but is usually associated with a grape harvest—a drawing study for the fan formerly in Minnie Cassatt Hickman’s collection in pencil on paper, also reproduced in Sotheby’s May 8, 2014, is entitled “The Pea Harvest” (Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami); the subjects and placement of the figures are clearly the same. Pissarro and Venturi identify The Met’s fan as "La récolte des choux" and date it about 1883, also after the exhibition in question, though it is unclear on what basis. However, we know The Met’s fan to have been purchased in the late seventies by Louisine Elder (see Weitzenhoffer 1986, Stein 1993, and see below). Certainly, we can see that, historically, dating for these fans has proven to be difficult.
The fan exhibited in 1879 was labeled in the catalogue as coming from the collection of “Mlle C,” who has been associated with Cassatt. Stein (1994) notes that Cassatt probably bought the work directly from the artist in 1879. It is believed that Cassatt bought the fan specifically for the collection of her good friend Louisine Elder, soon to be Louisine Havemeyer, the great patron of The Met alongside her husband H. O. Havemeyer (see, for example, Weitzenhoffer 1986). However, this particular piece did not arrive at The Met in the early twentieth century, unlike two Degas fans (
29.100.554 and
29.100.555) and so much of the Havemeyer collection. While Pissarro’s fan found its way from the Havemeyers to The Met, and, like Degas’s
Fan Mount: Dancers, seems to have gone through Cassatt to Havemeyer, the latter sold this fan in 1930 at the American Art Association as "Fan Painting: The Cabbage Gatherers." After two subsequent owners, The Met purchased the fan mount in 1994.
Burty’s Criticism and Pissarro’s Viewpoint: While Ernest d’Hervilly remarked upon “Pissarro’s beautiful rustic fans,” fellow critic Philippe Burty arrived at the 1879 Impressionist exhibition and determined Pissarro’s fans to be “too coarse for women.”[2] This viewpoint reflects the idea that fans were still associated (since the eighteenth-century, at least, in the Western tradition) with feminine bibelots used for adornment and allure more than the practicality of keeping cool. Yet, while so many of Degas’s and Pissarro’s fan mounts from around 1879 seem never to have been intended to be functional,[3] there is the distinct possibility that the artists expected to find favor for these untraditional paintings with their female followers. (Both Degas and Pissarro gave Cassatt fans as gifts.) They also had hoped to make money from them. When, badly in need of funds, Pissarro sold this fan, he wrote to his friend the pastry chef and collector Eugène Murer that it was merely a “drop of water against a large fire”; still, it gave him financial hope (Pissarro [1878]; Stein 1993). While Pissarro was successful in that he had already sold privately seven of the twelve fans he showed at that exhibition, Pickvance (1986, p. 260) reported that “despite Pissarro’s innovative efforts, it seems doubtful that he sold anything” from the 1879 show.
Pickvance remarked upon the “nostalgic, retrospective note” of Pissarro’s fans of 1879 and the painter’s use of this “minor medium” “as a means of rephrasing and reactivating drawn and painted compositions stretching back to his London period of 1870–71.” Certainly, the harvesting subject of The Met’s fan relates more to the artist’s time painting in the French countryside than in London, but the composition relates to a series of images of harvesting both peas and cabbages that the artist took up in paintings, drawings, and even other fans of the period. From his
Design for a Fan: The Harvesters (ca. 1880, private collection) and
Paysannes travaillant dans les champs, Pontoise (Peasant Women Working in the Fields, Pontoise) (1881, private collection) to the later
La Récolte des Pois (The Pea Harvest) (1887, private collection) and
Design for a Fan: The Pea Stakers (1890, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), he often returned to the theme of the back-breaking labor of rural women. Where Burty seems to have read these images of women at work as too brutish for the female upper classes to—quite literally—bear (no doubt, these were the women to whom he referred in his “too coarse for women” comment), Pissarro’s visions of countryside female labor have been discussed as romanticized images of health, vitality, productivity, and fulfillment.[4] This is in keeping with Pissarro’s admiration for the semi-Utopian theories of agriculture put forth by the Russian anarchist and historian Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921). Where Burty saw lower-class drudgery Pissarro found gold in the salt of the earth.
Jane R. Becker 2023
[1] See Barbara Stern Shapiro,
Mary Cassatt at Home, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1978, p. 16, no. 66.
[2] Ernest d’Hervilly,
Le Rappel, April 11, 1879, cited in Buffévent 2005, p. 163. Philippe Burty in
La République Française, April 16, 1879, cited in Pickvance 1986, p. 251 (also translated as “treated with ruggedness that women will scarcely allow” in Buffévent 2005, p. 163).
[3] On Degas’s reasons for turning to the genre, see the section on “Degas’s Probable Motivations for Fan Painting” in the catalogue entry for
Degas’s Fan Mount: The Ballet,
29.100.554.
[4] See, for example, Richard R. Brettell,
Pissarro’s People, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2011, p. 171, where he discusses the artist’s “strong and hardy” female workers and his revelation of a “relaxed beauty in fieldwork, which he associated with women as much as with men . . . . Pissarro seems to have been searching for a completely new kind of rural beauty, and he found it easier to embody these aesthetic yearnings in female figures.”
