Camille Pissarro’s Landscape near Pontoise, the Auvers Road

Meadow, farm, field, country town — Balthus’s landscapes are a return to Pisarro, to take up where he left off. Balthus is interested in the same continuities as in his interiors: the survival of certain manners, ways of spending time, intimacies of the bath and bed. Impressionism was devoted to roads, paths, rivers: a collective study of the network of roads that connected one French village to another. These ways were once ancient sheep paths, then market roads, then the highway system of the Romans. Impressionism was an assessment of civilization up to its time, as if prophetically aware that in 1914-1918 all this would be mud and trenches; seventy French cathedrals would collapse under artillery fire; a mode of life would be forever lost. Swann’s Way (the name of a road) ends with automobiles in the Bois de Boulogne.

From #19 of Guy Davenport’s The Balthus Notebook