Description
| Year: | 1909 |
| Original size: | 33 cm x 46.3 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (primitivism), post-impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located at: | Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan |
Scene in Bagneux on the Outskirts of Paris – a hand-painted reproduction
A pale cream cow stands broadside in a green meadow, head to the right, horns up, a dark
patch around the eye. Behind it stand two large conical haystacks with combed vertical
striations, the nearer one warm red-brown, the farther one paler. At the foot of the near
stack a figure in dark navy clothes and a broad pale straw hat sits low, holding an upright
pale pole, among a scatter of bright red flowers. A row of dark green trees flecked with
yellow closes the middle distance. At the left a steep dark spire rises above a low roof,
and a pale band of water shows behind the trees. A slender dark-leaved sapling stands at the
lower left. The upper half is soft pale blue sky. The signature is at the lower left here,
in dark red.
A cow, two stacks, and silence
Nothing happens in this canvas – and that is its subject. The animal stands, the person
sits, the hay is already in. With no event to follow, the eye travels the shapes instead: two
cones, one horizontal back, one vertical spire. It is a structure that reads as calm on a
wall and does not wear out, which suits a room you spend time in – a bedroom, a working
corner, a hallway you linger in. Outskirts of Paris has a similar quiet arrangement, also on the
edge of the city, but with no animal in the foreground.
The Paris edge as a group of its own
This shelf carries several scenes from the rim of Paris and they differ more than you
would expect. In Sawmill, Outskirts of Paris there is work in progress and timber; here the work is already
done. In The Banks of the Bièvre near Bicêtre water carries the eye into depth; here the trees stop it and the scene
stays shallow, almost like a stage. If the outskirts interest you as a motif, it is worth
seeing them together: one painter, one belt of land around the city, three different
solutions to space.
A small canvas that takes enlargement
The original measures 33 cm x 46.3 cm – among the smallest on this shelf. It still carries
at large sizes, because the shapes themselves are large and plain: the stacks, the animal’s
back, the spire. That is exactly why the big sizes are interesting here – what was compressed
into 33 centimetres opens out at a metre. We do not copy canvases at their original size; you
choose the size for your wall. To see how the same painter handles a clear, empty surface
with no architecture in it at all, look at Meadowland.
How a hand-painted reproduction is made
Every canvas is hand-painted in oil, to order, in the size you choose. The painter works
from a high-resolution photograph of the original, layer by layer, so that the striations in
the hay, the red flowers around the seated figure and the soft transitions of the sky stay
readable even at smaller sizes. Because this is handwork, two canvases of the same size are
always slightly different; that is not a fault but the difference between a painting and a
print. Prices start at 124 EUR for the smallest sizes on this page.
