Camille Pissarro

French artist

• Born: July 10, 1830
• Birthplace: Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, Danish West Indies(now in U.S. Virgin Islands)
• Died: November 13, 1903
• Place of death: Paris, France

Pissarro contributed to the formation of Impressionist techniques and thus to the Impressionist movement in France in the last half of the nineteenth century. In addition, he played an instrumental role in establishing a series of exhibitions to promote the work of the Impressionist artists.

Early Life

Born in the capital of the West Indian island of St. Thomas, Jacob Camille Pissarro (PEE-sah-roh) was the third of four sons of Jewish parents, Frédéric Pissarro and Rachel Manzano-Ponie Petit. His father’s family had left Bordeaux, France, in search of a better life and settled on St. Thomas, where they established a family-operated trading store. To his father’s displeasure, Camille spent his youthful years roaming the luxurious paths of the island, preferring to sketch and paint rather than work in the family business. At the age of twelve, Camille was sent to school in Passy, a suburb of Paris.

In Passy, the young Pissarro was encouraged by his schoolmaster to nurture his obvious talent, despite explicit instructions from his father that he was to be educated in business. After five years in Passy, his father called him home. The time in France, however, had left its mark on Pissarro. For the next five years, Pissarro preferred to sit by the docks, drawing and sketching the ships, or to hike across the island in search of suitable motifs for his sketchbook. During one of these excursions, he encountered Fritz Melbye, a Danish marine and landscape artist who encouraged Pissarro in developing a method of working outside, “in the fresh air” (en plein air), which he continued throughout most of his career. In 1852, the two artists moved to Caracas, Venezuela, where Pissarro remained for two years, painting continuously and interacting with the energetic artistic community in the capital. The years in Venezuela awakened Pissarro to his own ignorance of technique and of new directions then being taken in art. He left for France in 1855, never to see his homeland again.

Pissarro was twenty-five when he arrived in Paris, enthusiastic but naïve and already sporting the full, Old Testament prophet beard for which he became famous among his friends. While attending the Universal Exhibition, he discovered the work of Camille Corot , whose reputation, as both a painter and a teacher, was then at its height. Despite his youth and inexperience, Pissarro managed to show his work to the great master. Corot was favorably impressed, encouraging Pissarro to focus on developing what he termed values, or the harmony between two tones, in his work.

Life’s Work

The meeting with Corot in 1855 set Pissarro on a path that he was to follow, with only occasional digressions, for the remainder of his artistic career. Heeding Corot’s advice, he began to pay particular attention to the importance of tonal values in creating a truly harmonious work. He practiced a lifelong attention to the importance of drawing, to self-discipline manifested in daily exercising of his craft, to pleinairisme (“plain-airism”), to painting what he felt, and to painting not bit by bit but rather working on the whole canvas at once. In all of this he followed the tenets established by Corot. This focus on sensation ultimately became the basis of Pissarro’s work.

In 1858, Pissarro moved to Montmorency in order to paint the landscape en plein air. This first move to the country announced Pissarro’s lifelong struggle to reject the bourgeois oppressiveness of the city in favor of simpler, rural settings. Although later in life he was often to return to Paris, staying in various hotels and painting views of the city from his window, in his early years, he preferred the bucolic setting of the countryside to the bustle of urban life. During his frequent trips to the city, he developed friendships with most of the young avant-garde artists of the time, such as Paul Cézanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir . Because of his natural ability to offer criticism and guidance without offending the delicate egos of his colleagues, Pissarro quickly became a trustworthy and articulate spokesperson for the diverse group of artists soon to be known collectively as the Impressionists.

In 1871, Pissarro married Julie Vellay. Their first of seven children, Lucien, became an accomplished artist in his own right. Although much in love during the early years of their marriage, the couple’s constant financial struggles turned Julie into a sharp-tongued, unsupportive partner in later years. From all accounts, except those of Julie, Pissarro was a loving father. Nevertheless, his financial responsibility to his children never deterred him from resolutely continuing his painting even in the worst of times.

Firmly established among the Impressionists in Paris by 1863, Pissarro exhibited three paintings at the Salon des Refusés, an exhibit organized for those artists whose work had been refused by the judges for the official Salon exhibit of that year. The system of exhibitions was tightly regulated at the time by official judges (under the auspices of the emperor himself), who sought to establish national, and thus conservative, tastes in art. The Salon des Refusés was approved by the emperor in response to the artistic outcry against the conservatism of the official Salon art. Here were presented the most revolutionary works of the day. The exhibition drew desultory remarks from critics, derision, and the laughter of incomprehension from the general public. Pissarro’s works went virtually unnoticed as all attention was focused on Édouard Manet’s scandalous masterpiece, Luncheon on the Grass (1863), which depicted a naked female model accompanied on a picnic by two clothed gentlemen.

Infuriated by the public’s total disinterest in his work, Pissarro was nevertheless convinced of the rightness of the new direction he was taking with his compatriots. Unlike the realistic artists whose works were being shown in the grand Salons, Pissarro and the other Impressionists sought first to capture the fugitive effects of light on a subject at a particular moment in time. Through the use of bold colors, slashing brushstrokes, and motifs chosen from everyday life, these young iconoclasts attempted to transform on canvas an effect of an impression of reality into a visually more personal, thus in their view more realistic, representation of the world.

By 1874, Pissarro was one of the acknowledged leaders of the Impressionist movement and assisted in organizing an Exhibition of the Society of Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, etc., the first of eight Impressionist exhibitions. The show included the works of Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Cézanne. Although his work elicited only negative reactions, during the late 1870’s and early 1880’s he continued to paint in the Impressionist mode, experimenting with colors and different brushstrokes. Gradually he developed a highly personal and easily identifiable style, known as “Pissarro’s tricotage” (knitting), consisting of parallel cross-hatchings of varying dimensions, which give his work of this period a distinctive sense of movement and textural unity.

Pissarro’s art took a dramatic turn in October, 1885, after a meeting with the painter Georges Seurat . Influenced by then-current scientific theories of color and its perception by the human eye, Seurat departed from the Impressionists to develop a pointillist, or divisionist, style of painting using small dots of color rather than brushstrokes. Seurat’s neo-Impressionist work announced a dramatically new intent to make visible the subjective rather than, as the Impressionists had sought to do, to make the objective world subjective. Pissarro exhibited his divisionist work alongside that of Seurat in May, 1887, but without success.

Pissarro’s neo-Impressionist phase lasted about five years, although strictly pointillist technique distinguishes only part of his work of this period. Although his works sold poorly, he made many new friends, particularly among the Symbolist poets and writers who regarded neo-Impressionism as a visual translation of their quest toward verbal fluidity and musicality. He was also developing a strong sense of the social function of art as a supportive statement of the need for societal change, as professed by the active group of anarchists in Paris with whom he was acquainted. Melding politics and aesthetics, his work contains numerous scenes of peasants working cooperatively and serenely in the fields, content in their distance from the harsh realities of industrialization. By the late 1880’s, Pissarro had found the divisionist methods tedious and abandoned the technique.

A retrospective exhibit of Pissarro’s work in January, 1892, proved popular with critics and public, particularly a series of landscapes and landmarks painted during a trip to London. All seventy-one works exhibited were sold, finally establishing the artist’s commercial success at the age of sixty-two. His continued association with various revolutionary groups resulted in his having to flee to Belgium in 1894.

In his final years, Pissarro enjoyed the rewards of a lifetime of hard work. Financial security came with an exhibition in 1896 of a series of paintings of the Seine executed in Rouen. Two final series of works, one of the Parisian Grands Boulevards, the other of the Avenue de l’Opéra, capped his career with critical and public acclaim. Having rented in 1900 a small apartment in Paris, he spent his last years focusing his vision on urban motifs: views of the Louvre, the Pont-Neuf, and the Tuileries Gardens. At the age of seventy-three, he developed an abcess of the prostate gland. Having always believed in the country wisdom of homeopathic medicine, he refused the necessary operation and succumbed to septicemia in 1903.

Significance

Camille Pissarro never produced a signature painting that critics regard as his masterpiece. One may speak of a series of masterful works, yet no single work stands clearly above the rest. Perhaps this is true, as one critic has suggested, because Pissarro saw art as “a continual search after the eternally changing.” His love of fall and winter scenes—for example, his fascination with light playing on snow-covered hills and streets—led him to paint dozens of canvases of Pontoise and its environs, each distinctive yet most effectively viewed as one part of a corporate vision of the village.

The internal coherence of each painting was supremely important for Pissarro. His son Lucien identified the dominant characteristic as a concern for les valeurs rapprochées (closely related values of color). Viewing Pissarro’s work over a forty-year period from 1863 to 1903, one notes that while the artist often adjusted his style to his subject, he was always ruled by the immediacy of sensations brought into direct experience with his motif, sensations that he then struggled to order into an “idea of unity.” Although his work was generally not appreciated in his own lifetime, critical consensus has established his rightful place among the giants of the Impressionist movement.

Bibliography

Adler, Kathleen. Camille Pissarro: A Biography. London: B. T. Batsford, 1978. A short, 190-page biography, which was the first to reconstruct Pissarro’s life for the English reader. The work contains numerous illustrations and photographs of the artist and his family. The useful combination of endnotes and bibliography into one document provides the reader with easy access to secondary sources, arranged chronologically.

Lloyd, Christopher, ed. Studies on Camille Pissarro. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986. A series of essays covering diverse aspects of Pissarro’s life and work, authored by some of the most eminent of modern Pissarro critics. Several previously unexplored aspects of Pissarro’s work are examined, such as the link between his political philosophy and his art, and the possible influence of Rembrandt on Pissarro’s etchings.

Pissarro, Joachim. Camille Pissarro. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1993. An objective reassessment of Pissarro’s art by his great-grandson, an art historian and curator. Initial chapters provide a chronological overview of Pissarro’s work, while later chapters focus on specific genres, including market scenes, landscapes, and interiors. Includes 354 illustrations (205 of them in color).

Rewald, John, ed. Camille Pissarro. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1963. Perhaps the best of the relatively few collections of Pissarro’s work in print, included in the Library of Great Painters series. A short introduction highlights the principal events in the artist’s life and identifies major influences. Historical and aesthetic commentaries accompany each color plate.

Shikes, Ralph E., and Paula Harper. Pissarro: His Life and Work. New York: Horizon Press, 1980. A thorough and sensitive rendering of Pissarro’s life in the context of his artistic evolution. The work contains twenty-one color plates and black-and-white reproductions. Drawing from material previously unpublished, the authors seek to reveal the complex and contradictory character of the artist. A current bibliography and detailed index assist both the casual and serious reader.

Stone, Irving. Depths of Glory: A Biographical Novel of Camille Pissarro. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985. Although a biographical novel, Stone’s work scrupulously follows the documented details and spirit of Pissarro’s life. A splendid evocation of the times by the author of similar works on the lives of Vincent van Gogh and Michelangelo. The serious reader will not be deterred by the novel’s six hundred compellingly written pages.

Ward, Martha. Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Tracks the development and reception of the neo-Impressionists, a group of French artists and critics who, during the 1880’s and 1890’s, created a modern vanguard movement. Discusses the work of Pissarro and the other artists in the group.