PISSARRO, CAMILLE

PISSARRO, CAMILLE (1830–1903), French painter.

A key figure in both the impressionist and post-impressionist movements, Jacob-Abraham-Camille Pissarro is best known for his versatility as an artist and for his landscapes, his views of provincial towns and peasants at work, and his townscapes of Paris, Rouen, and other French cities. The only artist to participate in all eight impressionist exhibitions, he maintained relationships with artists of both movements and mentored younger artists, including Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) and Paul Gauguin (1848–1903). His political and social opinions were radical, and he openly sympathized with anarchism.

Pissarro was born on 10 July 1830 on St. Thomas in the Danish West Indies. His parents, Frédéric Pissarro and Rachel Petit, were of French Jewish origin and earned a comfortable income as merchants. Between 1842 and 1847, young Pissarro attended the Pension Savary in Passy, outside Paris. He received instruction in art and frequented the Louvre. Some contemporaries, including his friend Cézanne, and modern scholars contend that Pissarro's independence and originality as an artist stemmed in part from his lack of exposure to the Parisian art world or the Academy. Pissarro returned to St. Thomas in 1847 and worked unhappily in the family business until 1852. Meanwhile, he began sketching nearby scenes. Around 1850, he met the Danish artist Fritz Melbye (1826–1896), received more instruction, and decided to be an artist. Between 1852 and 1854, he lived in Caracas with Melbye and completed drawings, watercolors, and oils. Characteristic subjects included views of marketplaces, studies of females, landscapes, and genre scenes. After another year working in the family business, Pissarro departed for Paris in 1855 and began his artistic career.

In Paris, Pissarro continued his training and enjoyed initial success, including exhibiting eleven works at seven Salons between 1859 and 1870. He attended classes at the École des Beaux-Arts, copied paintings in the Louvre, and attended the Académie Suisse. He met Claude Monet (1840–1926), Cézanne, and other aspiring painters. Works from this period reflect the influence of the Barbizon painters, particularly Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875), who advocated painting out-of-doors. Frequently on the move, Pissarro lived and worked both in Paris and a series of provincial towns, like Louveciennes and Pontoise, the latter the subject of important paintings. Landscapes, like The Banks of Marne at Chennevières

(1864–1865), provincial townscapes like The Hillsides of the Hermitage, Pontoise (1867), and numerous views of Louveciennes illustrate how Pissarro developed an individual style. Works exhibited at the Salon won praise, particularly from novelist and critic Émile Zola (1840–1902). Pissarro joined Monet and other young artists in critiquing what they considered the stranglehold then held by the Salon on French art. Meanwhile he commenced a relationship with Julie Vellay, with whom he had eight children; the two did not marry until 1871.

After the Franco-Prussian War began in 1870, Pissarro left for London, where he joined Monet and met the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel (1831–1922). He returned to France in 1871 and found that his house had been looted by Prussian soldiers, who had destroyed many paintings. Although he lived mostly in Pontoise during the 1870s, he continued his practice of painting in a variety of locales, including Paris. It was there that Pissarro, in collaboration with Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), and other painters discontent with the official salon, formed the "Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc." and staged the first Impressionist Exhibition in 1874. He contributed five paintings, mostly of rural and provincial subjects, including The Chestnut Trees at Osny (1873). Pissarro helped organize the other seven impressionist exhibitions, and he exhibited in each of them, even as artists like Monet, Renoir, and Cézanne ceased to show and younger artists like Gauguin began participating. During the 1870s, Pissarro and Cézanne worked closely together and influenced each other's artistic development.

In 1884 the Pissarros moved to Eragny-sur-Epte, and his career took a new direction, one influenced by neo-impressionism and artists like Georges Seurat (1859–1891) and Paul Signac (1863–1935). He briefly experimented with pointillism. At the eighth and final Impressionist Exhibition (1886), he showed nine oils and a number of drawings and prints, including the pointillistic View from My Window, Eragny (1886–1888). Paintings from this decade include railway views, images of peasants at work, and depictions of provincial marketplaces.

During the 1890s, Pissarro undertook a series of urban paintings and expressed forcefully his long-held sympathy for anarchism. He subscribed to anarchist publications like Jean Grave's La Révolte, shared the anarchist's disdain for the state and its institutions, bourgeois society, organized religion, and exploitive capitalism, and expressed sympathy for the oppressed, the poor, and the outcast. There also is pictorial evidence, like Apple Picking at Eragny-sur-Epte (1889), that he valued the work of the rural peasant over that of the urban factory worker. Rarely, however, did Pissarro's political beliefs directly influence his art. An important exception is the Turpitudes sociales (Social turpitudes), a collection of sketches and anarchist texts he sent to his niece Esther Isaacson in about 1890. These images critiqued the greed of capitalism and depicted the oppression of workers and the poor. In 1892 a successful retrospective of Pissarro's work took place at the Durand-Ruel Gallery.

Beginning about 1892, Pissarro painted over three hundred urban scenes, especially the streets of Georges-Eugéne Haussmann's transformed Paris, the streets and harbor of Rouen, and harbor scenes of Dieppe and Le Havre. Pissarro often painted these scenes from an elevated viewpoint, perhaps because of his chronic eye disease or an aversion to urban noise and congestion. As paintings like Avenue de l'Opéra: Sunshine, Winter Morning (1898) or The Boieldieu Bridge, Rouen, Damp Weather (1896) make evident, Pissarro's treatment of urban topography and life is dispassionate and detached. Pissarro died in Paris on 13 November 1903, and he is buried with much of his family in the cemetery of Père Lachaise.

See alsoAnarchism; Cézanne, Paul; Gauguin, Paul; Impressionism; Monet, Claude; Painting; Paris; Seurat, Georges.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Bailly-Herzberg, Janine, ed. Correspondance de Camille Pissarro. 5 vols. 1980–1991. Available only in French.

Pissarro, Camille. Camille Pissarro: Letters to His Son Lucien. Edited John Rewald with Lucien Pissarro. 3rd ed., rev. and enlarged. Mamaroneck, N.Y., 1972.

Secondary Sources

Brettell, Richard R., with Joachim Pissarro. Pissarro and Pontoise: The Painter in a Landscape. New Haven, Conn., 1990. A pioneering scholarly study.

——. The Impressionist and the City: Pissarro's Series Paintings. Edited by Mary Anne Stevens. New Haven, Conn., 1992. Well-illustrated exhibition catalog.

Pissarro, Joachim. Camille Pissarro. New York, 1992. Beautifully illustrated account of his life and work.

Shikes, Ralph E., and Paula Harper. Pissarro: His Life and Work. New York, 1980. A comprehensive biography.

Robert W. Brown