Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

Pierre Roy became associated with the Surrealists in the 1920s. He began using a meticulous trompe l’oeil technique to endow ordinary objects with a sense of mystery, as in this still life of disparate objects (including an imaginary astronomical instrument) set before a landscape. Roy completed a relatively small body of work due to the amount of time needed to execute one of his carefully-crafted paintings. When Paysage was exhibited in Pittsburgh at the Carnegie International Exhibition in 1937, a reviewer singled it out for special praise: “Pierre Roy is [a] delightful painter…. His beautiful purity of color and precision of statement carry out his highly individual ideas in imaginative designs.”