Painted resting in a field in Pontoise, the figure in Pissarro’s ‘Le Père Melon au repos’ appears in at least two oil paintings and three pastels. Although clearly having captured the imagination of the artist, the identity of the man remain unknown.

In 1879, the year he painted ‘Le Père Melon au repos’, Pissarro’s interest in the human figure became of greater importance in his art. ‘Le Père Melon au repos’ marks a decided shift in his pictorial style, with the landscape acting secondary to the figure. Rather than depicting a figure within the landscape, the current painting is closer to a portrait, with the man staring out from the canvas. Within this lies the radicalism to Pissarro’s art.

While portraiture had previously been reserved for the elite, here Pissarro depicts a working class man with the same gravitas as a bourgeois subject. ‘Le Père Melon au repos’ is powerful in its simplicity, eloquently depicting the man without sentimentality or placing him on an unattainable pedestal.

This important painting spent over twenty years on loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and has been included in multiple international exhibitions such as at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (1995); Isetan Museum of Art, Tokyo (1998) and Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale (2000).

The companion oil painting to the current work was first in the collection of Paul Gauguin, a great admirer of Pissarro.