^
Died on 13 November 1903: Jacob
Camille Pissarro, French Pointillist
and Impressionist
painter specialized in landscapes,
born on 10 July 1830. — Father of Lucien
Pissarro. Studied under Jean-Baptiste-Camille
Corot.
— Born to a Creole mother and a French father, Pissarro was sent to
boarding school in Paris for five years. After eight years back in Saint
Thomas and then Caracas, he returned to Paris in 1855 to study art, working
first with Anton Melbye and then at the Académie Suisse where he
met Monet,
Jean-Baptiste
Armand Guillaumin [1841–1927], and Cézanne.
Painting out-of-doors, he developed a personal style much influenced by
Courbet
and Corot
[1796–1875] but with a distinct feeling for structure and contrasting
tonal values in the landscape. He had his first painting accepted at the
Salon of 1859, then joined with Cézanne, Manet
(1832–1883), and others in the 1863 Salon des Refusés.
The Salon des Refusés was an art exhibition
held in Paris in 1863, set up by the government at the urging of the artists
involved, as an exhibition of paintings that had been refused by the official
annual Salon of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The show's major sensations
were two paintings by Edouard Manet , each considered scandalous-- Déjeuner
sur l'herbe, for portraying nude and clothed figures together in a
scene of everyday life, and Olympia, for portraying a nude prostitute,
whose form was not typical of those considered ideal. Other exhibitors were
Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and James
A. M. Whistler [1834-1903].
Pissarro fled to England during the FrancoPrussian
War. Back in Paris, he was a guiding force behind the first impressionist
exhibition in 1874 and participated in all seven subsequent group shows.
His work gave way in the mid-eighties to a divisionist manner inspired by
Seurat
[1859–1891], but he returned to a looser, less "scientific" style in
the early nineties, and his late serial paintings of cityscapes and harbors
are among his greatest achievements.
— Pissarro was born in St. Thomas, in the West Indies
into the family of a merchant. His father was of French-Jewish origin, his
mother was a Creole. First Camille started his career as a businessman,
like his father, but his obsession with painting changed the direction of
his life. In 1852 he got acquainted with the Danish painter F. Melbye and
spent about two years with him in Caracas.
In 1855, he came to Paris, where he was impressed
by the landscapes of Corot. He painted in Paris and in its suburbs; in 1859,
he was admitted to the Salon. In 1859-1861, he attended the Académie
Suisse and formed friendships with Monet,
Guillaumin and Cézanne.
Approximately at the same time his liaison with Julie Vellay started; they
would marry ten years later, in 1871; they had eight children; their two
sons, Lucien Pissarro [1863-1944], and Georges Pissarro [1871-1961] would
both become artists.
Rejected by the Salon in 1861 and 1863, Pissarro
showed at the “Salon des Refusés” in 1863. Though in 1864-1868 he
exhibited at the Salon, his pictures were not popular with public, nobody
bought them, and financial difficulties started.
In 1866-1868, Pissarro lived and worked in Pontoise, painted landscapes
in which he changed from Barbizon Realism of Corot to Impressionism; in
1869-1870 he moved to Louveciennes, where many of his paintings were destroyed
by German troops during the occupation of Louveciennes in the Franco-Prussian
War of 1870-1871. The artist at the time stayed with his family in London.
Pissarro’s friend, the painter Daubigny, recommended
him to the art dealer Durand-Ruel, who did much for promotion of the Impressionists’
works; he would organize Pissarro’s exhibitions in Paris (1883) and New
York (1886).
In 1872-1878, Pissarro stayed in Pontoise, working with Cézanne,
on whom he exercised considerable influence. At this time his independent
Impressionist style fully developed. Pissarro was the leader of the original
Impressionists, and the only one to exhibit at all eight of the Group exhibitions
in Paris from 1874 to 1886.
In 1885, he met Signac and Seurat and for
the next five years adopted their Divisionist/ Pointillist style. Pissarro’s
interest in Socialism brought him some trouble: in 1894 he had to flee to
Belgium from the French persecution of Anarchists, he had become an Anarchist
in 1885. In 1896 and 1898, he painted views of the town and harbor of Rouen,
remaining faithful to the early Impressionist style. In 1897-1903, he mainly
painted views of Paris, also Dieppe and Le Havre. He died in Paris.
— Pissarro was born to French Jewish parents on the West Indies island
of St. Thomas. Sent to boarding school in France, he returned after six
years to work in his parents' store. Pissarro abandoned this comfortable
bourgeois existence at the age of twenty-two, when he left for Caracas with
Danish painter Fritz Melbye, who became his first serious artistic influence.
After returning briefly to St. Thomas, Pissarro
left in 1855 for Paris, where he studied at various academic institutions
(including the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Académie Suisse) and under
a succession of masters (including Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave
Courbet, and Charles-François Daubigny). Corot is often considered
Pissarro's most important early influence; Pissarro listed himself as Corot's
student in the catalogues to the 1864 and 1865 Paris Salons. While Pissarro
was accepted to show at the official Salon throughout the 1860s, in 1863
he participated with Edouard
Manet, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and others in the historic Salon
des Refusés. At the close of the decade, he moved to Louveciennes (near
the Seine, twenty miles from Paris). Working in close proximity with Claude
Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley, he began to revise his
method of landscape painting, privileging the role of color in his expression
of natural phenomena and employing smaller patches of paint. This artistic
circle was dispersed by the Franco-Prussian War, which Pissarro fled by
moving to London in 1870-71. There he met Paul Durand-Ruel, the Parisian
dealer who would become an ardent supporter of Pissarro and his fellow Impressionists.
Pissarro participated in his last official Salon in 1870.
The years after Pissarro's return to France
were seminal ones. He settled in Pontoise, where he received young artists
seeking advice, including Paul Cézanne and Paul
Gauguin. He took part in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874.
Pissarro — along with Edgar Degas, one of the Salon's most passionate
critics — was the only artist to show at all eight of the Impressionist
exhibitions, the last of which took place in 1886.
Pissarro experienced somewhat of an artistic
crisis in 1885. As he had done consistently throughout his career, he opened
himself up to fresh influences by meeting with the younger generation, this
time with Paul Signac and Georges
Seurat, who were experimenting with a divisionist technique rooted in
the scientific study of optics.
Pissarro lived long enough to witness the
start of the Impressionists' fame and influence. He was revered by the Post-Impressionists,
including Cézanne and Gauguin, who both referred to him toward the
end of their own careers as their master. In the last years of his life,
Pissarro experienced eye trouble, which forced him to abandon outdoor painting.
He continued to work in his studio until his death in Paris.
— Born in Saint Thomas in the West Indies of a fairly affluent mercantile
family, Pissarro was sent to Paris to complete his education. In 1855 he
enrolled at the Academie Suisse, where he got to know Monet,
and by frequenting the Café
Guerbois he soon met the other Impressionist artists. Influenced by
Corot, he exhibited at the Salon between 1864 and 1869, and at the Salon
des Refuses in 1863. During the Franco-Prussian War he joined Monet in London
where they met Durand-Ruel. Actively involved in the creation of the Societe
Anonyme des Artistes, he took part in all the Impressionist exhibitions.
Around 1865 Pissarro adopted a form of Pointillism, but he eventually reverted
to his earlier style. His versatility extended to fan and porcelain painting,
engraving and illustration. Politically a radical, he had a strong leaning
towards the anarchistic beliefs that were causing alarm throughout Europe
society at the time.
Pissarro's impressionism has much of the sobriety
of Sisley's
but less reflective. He was the oldest member of the group, being two years
older even than Edouard
Manet. Everyone who knew Pissarro seems to have left some account of
him, and by all these accounts his life and his character were a catalog
of virtues — loyalty to his friends, wisdom as the father of a large
family, courage in adversity, and patience, tolerance, honesty, and industry
in all circumstances.
Although Pissarro was intent upon capturing
transient effects just as Monet was, he never abandoned the relative discipline
of early impressionism, and for a while late in his career he joined the
"neo-impressionists," who tried to solidify impressionism by systematizing
its free prismatic shattering of light into a scientific application of
color into minutely calculated dots. Pissarro soon abandoned this extreme,
but that he was attracted to it at all shows his cautiousness in the use
of impressionist effects. While Monet was pushing further into exploration
of effects of light in air at the expense of form, Pissarro was retreating.
The Market at Gisors is an effort to retain the atmospheric vibration
of impressionism while at the same time imposing the discipline of well
defined contours on forms monumentally arranged in space.
More than any other member of the group,
Pissarro encouraged younger men. At least three painters who were notoriously
suspicious and thorny to deal with — Degas,
Cézanne,
and Gauguin
— always retained a deep affection for him. Like Monet's and Sisley's,
his financial situation was often desperate and at best difficult, but finally,
at the age of sixty-two, he had the satisfaction of seeing his reputation
established, not spectacularly but sound enough, in a large retrospective
exhibition organized by Durand-Ruel. It was a gratifyingly happy ending
to an admirable career.
— LINKS
— Self-Portrait
(1873) — Another
Self-Portrait
— Le
Port de Dieppe (1902, 47x55cm)
— Bouquet
de Fleurs (54x65cm)
— Place
de l'Opéra en temps brumeux
— Place
du Théâtre Français, Paris: Pluie (1898, 74x91cm; half size, 2428kb)
_ After a chronic eye infection limited the amount of time Camille Pissarro
could spend outdoors, he began a series of views of Paris seen from hotel
windows. Hoping to show the beauty of the bustling city, he painted this
view down the Avenue de l'Opéra and other vistas at different hours
and seasons, and under varying weather conditions.
— Paysage
à Pontoise avec un Chasseur (1879, 55x65cm; 2/5 size _ ZOOM
to 4/5 size)
— The
Road Near the Farm (1871, 38x46cm; 3/5 size)
— Snow
Scene at Eragny (View of Bazincourt) (1884, 47x56cm; half size
_ ZOOM
to full size)
— La
Récolte des Betteraves (1881, 26x38cm; full size, 1277kb)
— La
Foire à Dieppe — Toits
Rouges (46x48cm)
— Paysannes
nues dans l'herbe (1895 monotype, 13x18cm; 4/5 size)
— Le
Semeur — Portrait
of the Artist's Son, Félix (1880 drawing, 20x15cm; full size)
— Église et ferme d'Éragny
(1890 color etching, 16x24cm; 2/3 size) — La
Charrue (1901 color lithograph)
— Paul
Cézanne (1874 etching, 27x21cm; full size)
— Cézanne
(1874, 73x60cm; 420x320pix, 30kb) _ Pissarro's influence profoundly changed
the direction of Cézanne's art as they worked together at Pontoise in the
early 1870s. In this portrait of Cézanne, a painting by Pissarro hangs at
the lower right. Two political prints show the statesman Adolphe Thiers
on the left and the painter Courbet on the right, famous men of the day
who both seem to acknowledge Cézanne. The portrait is a tutor's affectionate
testament of support and friendship for a brilliant protégé, and a humorous
prediction that fame and glory would one day be his.
— La
masure (1879 etching, 17x17cm; full size)
— Femme
dans un potager (1880 etching, 25x17cm; full size) — Quai Malaquais,
Après-Midi Ensoleillée
— Boulevard
Montmartre de nuit — The Boieldieu Bridge to Rouen,
Sunset |
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