Footnotes

Provenance
With Leicester Galleries, London, 1940s, where acquired by
R.H. Boyd, F.R.C.S., thence by descent to the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Leicester Galleries, Lucien Pissarro, November 1934, cat.no.41
Manchester, Art Exhibitions Bureau tour, City Art Gallery, Paintings and Drawings by Lucien Pissarro, June-July 1935, cat.no.78; this exhibition travelled to Birkenhead, Williamson Art Gallery, July-August 1935, cat.no.47; Blackpool, Grundy Art Gallery, October 1935; Lincoln, Usher Art Gallery, November-December 1935; Burton on Trent, County Borough Museum and Art Gallery, February 1936; Belfast, City Museum and Art Gallery, May-June 1936, cat.no.54; Rochdale, Corporation Art Gallery, June-July 1936, cat.no.54; and Gateshead, Shipley Art Gallery, August 1936, cat.no.54
London, Royal Academy of Arts, Summer Exhibition, 4 May-8 August 1942, cat.no.27
Brighton, Public Art Galleries 1942, cat.no.46 (catalogue untraced)
London, Leicester Galleries, 1943 cat.no.126 (catalogue untraced)
London, Ben Uri Gallery 1944 cat.no.114 (catalogue untraced)
Levant Galleries, 1944 (catalogue untraced)

Literature
Anne Thorold, A Catalogue of the Oil Paintings of Lucien Pissarro, Athelney Books, London, 1983, p.214, cat.no.506

This landscape depicts Mont Verdaille with the Sanctuaire de Notre Dames des Grâces on its summit. To the left, beyond the lower slope, is the village of Cotignac. The history of this monastery is rich in stories of mystical visions and religious annunciations, but the place is most famous for the epiphany that foresaw the conception of Louis XIV, King of France. In 1637, an Augustinian brother of the Monastery of Notre Dame des Victoires in Paris received a revelation from the Virgin Mary. The brother divined that the childless Queen of France Anne of Austria would have to visit Notre Dames des Grâces to bear a Dauphin. Louis was born ten months later. After twenty-two years of marriage without producing an heir, this birth was considered miraculous and a gift of God. Obsessed as he was about his own divine nature, a twenty-two-year-old Louis would return with his mother to the monastery to thank the Virgin Mary. When the Queen Mother died, he placed a memorial plaque to her in the chapel, which is still in place today.

Pissarro painted six landscapes at Cotignac between March and July 1937, another example of which is in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.