‘Nothing new and excellent appeared where he wasn’t among the
first, if not absolutely the first, to discern and defend’-
Thadée Natanson, the Parisian critic and editor of La Revue Blanche Camille Pissarro was a French Impressionist painter. His importance resides not only in his visual contributions to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, but also in his patriarchal standing among his colleagues, particularly Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin. Born July 10, 1830 in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. to Abraham Gabriel Pissarro, and Rachel Manzano-Pomié, who was from the Dominican Republic. Pissarro lived in St. Thomas until age 12, when he was sent to Paris to study. As a boy, he earned acclaim for his budding talent as an artist. Pissarro returned to St. Thomas where he drew in his free time. In 1852, he traveled to Venezuela with the Danish artist Fritz Melbye, but was obligated to return to St. Thomas in 1847 to help his father run his general store. In 1855, Paul Pissarro had convinced his parents to allow him to pursue his dream of becoming a painter settling in France. He arrived in time to see the great World's Fair which included a large art section. Following the advice of Corot, whose landscapes he had admired at the fair, Pissarro was soon painting and sketching in small towns and villages near Paris, along the Seine, Oise and Marne rivers. He studied at the Académie Suisse and formed friendships with Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, and other future members of the Impressionist group. By the late 1860s, his powerful realist landscapes, like "View from Louveciennes" (shown) were praised by the prominent critic Emile Zola. This landscape is one of the finest extant examples of Pissarro's earlier work. It was probably painted in the spring of 1870. The previous year Pissarro had moved from Pontoise to Louveciennes, a village a few miles west of Paris, where fellow Impressionists Renoir, Monet and Sisley were then active. Louveciennes overlooks the Seine and is close to the Forest and Park of Marly-le-Roi. |
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During the Franco-Prussian War, Camille Pissarro left France for London
with his friend Claude Monet. There, they were influenced by the
landscape paintings of John Constable and
J.M.W. Turner in developing a unique style that would later be known
as Impressionism. Upon returning to his home near Paris, Pissarro
discovered that the Prussians had destroyed nearly all of his paintings,
only 40 of his 1500 paintings, remained undamaged. In the summer of 1871
Camille settled in Pontoise where he was to remain for the next ten
years, gathering a close circle of friends around him. Cézanne
repeatedly came to stay with him and under Camille's influence learned
to study nature more patiently. These were also the years of the first
Impressionist group exhibitions which were initiated by Monet, but in
which Camille was to play a major role and which earned him much
criticism for his art. While mainly interested in landscape, he liked to
introduce people (generally peasants going about their rural
occupations) and animals into these and they often became the focal
point of the composition. It was this unsentimental and unliterary
approach, and the complete absence of any pretence, that seemed to stop
his work from finding appreciation with the general public. |
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 By
1873Camille Pissarro and his Impressionist colleagues finally abandoned
the Salon altogether, a move which gave birth to the first of the
Impressionist exhibitions. The first of these independent shows was held
in 1874 and included Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, Sisley,
Edgar Degas, and
Berthe Morisot. Pissarro
was the only painter of the Impressionist group who participated in all
eight of the ground-breaking Impressionist exhibitions held in Paris
between 1874 and 1886. He acted as the principal organizer of the first
exhibition, which opened in the photographer Nadar’s studio in April
1874. It was also Pissarro who drafted the first convention
incorporating the group then calling themselves the ‘Société Anonyme des
Artistes’. Consequently, Pissarro was regarded as the central figure of
the group. Moreover, whereas Monet was the most prolific and emblematic
practitioner of the Impressionist style, Pissarro was nonetheless a
primary developer of Impressionist technique. Camille Pissarro was seen
as the patriarch of the Impressionist movement, and was constantly
encouraging younger artists and managing the artistic revolution’s
progress. In 1892, he finally received the international recognition he
deserved with a large-scale retrospective of his work. His mature work
displays an empathy for peasants and laborers, and sometimes evidences
his radical political leanings. In common with many artists and writers
of his day, he became a fervent anarchist. Camille Pissarro produced a
powerful attack on French bourgeois society in his album of anarchist
drawings, Turpitudes Sociales, 1889. |
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Pissarro experimented with Neo-Impressionist ideas between 1885 and 1890.In 1885, he met Paul Signac and Georges Seurat and for the next five years adopted their Pointillist style. Discontented with what he referred to as "romantic Impressionism," he investigated Pointillism which he called "scientific Impressionism" before returning to a purer Impressionism in the last decade of his life. In the last years of his life Camille divided his time between Paris, Rouen, Le Havre and his home in Eragny and painted several series of different aspects of the cities with varying light and weather effects, while expressing the dynamism of the modern city. Many of these paintings are considered amongst his best and make a fitting finale to his long and eventful career. Always searching for new means of expression, Pissarro was one of the most innovative of the Impressionists. A self-effacing, kindly man, Pissarro experienced chronic problems selling his paintings and supporting his family. (He had eight children, three of whom died). But he never gave up, pursuing his principles doggedly, insisting on his freedom to experiment in order to create afresh. |
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