Camille Pissarro, in full Jacob-Abraham-Camille Pissarro (born July 10, 1830, St. Thomas, Danish West Indies-died Nov. 13, 1903, Paris, France), painter and printmaker who was a key figure in the history of Impressionism.
Pissarro was the only artist to show his work in all eight Impressionist group exhibitions; throughout his career he remained dedicated to the idea of such alternative forums of exhibition. He experimented with many styles, including a period when he adopted Georges Seurat’s "pointillist" approach.
A supportive friend and mentor to influential artists such as Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, he was described by many who knew him as "Father Pissarro".
Childhood
Pissarro was the third son of a Jewish merchant of French, originally Portuguese, descent. His family lived above their shop on Charlotte Amalie, the main street of St. Thomas. When Camille was 12 years old, his parents sent him away to a school in Passy, near Paris.
The young Pissarro showed an early talent for drawing, and he began to visit the collections of the Louvre.
At age 17 he returned to St. Thomas, where his father expected him to enter the family business. Pissarro was more interested in sketching at the harbour, however, and, after meeting the visiting Danish painter Fritz Melbye, he sailed with the older artist to Venezuela in November 1852. Later, Pissarro said he had "abandoned all I had and bolted to Caracas to get clear of the bondage of bourgeois life".
While in Caracas, Pissarro made many sketches of life on the streets. He returned to St. Thomas in August 1854. This time his parents finally realized that no amount of argument would change their son’s determination to be a painter, and so in the fall of 1855 he left home for the last time, bound for Paris.
Early career
Pissarro arrived in time to see the contemporary art on display at Paris’s Universal Exposition, where he was strongly attracted to the paintings of Camille Corot. He began to attend private classes at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1856, and in 1861 he registered as a copyist at the Louvre.
He also attended the Académie Suisse, a "free studio", where he met future Impressionists Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, and Armand Guillaumin. Through Monet, he also met Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley.
In these early years in France, Pissarro painted scenes of the West Indies from memory, and he found guidance from Melbye’s brother Anton. Indeed, when he first showed work at the Paris Salon of 1859, Pissarro called himself "Pupil of A. Melbye", a title he continued to use until 1866.
He was also taught informally by Corot, who urged him to paint from nature. Reflecting the influence of Corot, Pissarro’s early paintings usually include a path or river receding in perspective, as well as figures-generally viewed from the back-that give an overall sense of scale.
His early works are blonde and green in tonality, however, in contrast to the silvery tonality of Corot’s work.
During this period Pissarro spent time in rural areas such as Montmorency, La Roche-Guyon, and Pontoise, where he could find ample subject matter for landscape painting. This established a lifelong pattern of working outside Paris while also frequently staying in the city.
About 1860 he began a relationship with Julie Vellay, his mother’s maid, and in 1863 their first child, Lucien, was born. (The couple married in London in 1871; in all, they would eventually have eight children.)
Pissarro became more and more opposed to the standards of the École des Beaux-Arts and the Academy throughout the 1860s, and he occasionally took part in lively debates with younger artists such as Monet and Renoir at the Café Guérbois. Ten years older than such artists, Pissarro was seen as a father figure, and his fierce arguments about egalitarianism and the inequities of the system of juries and prizes impressed everyone.
Although he showed his work at the Paris Salon, he and his colleagues came increasingly to recognize the unfairness of the Salon’s jury system as well as the disadvantages relatively small paintings such as their own had at Salon exhibitions.
Discussions in the art world were interrupted, however, by the outbreak of the Franco-German War in 1870. Pissarro left for London, where he met up with Monet and the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel.
Pissarro lived in south London for a time and painted scenes, such as The Crystal Palace, London (1871), of the newly emerging suburbs there. Many years later, he wrote: "Monet and I were very enthusiastic over the London landscapes. Monet worked in the parks, while I, living in Lower Norwood, at that time a charming suburb, studied the effects of fog, snow, and springtime".
On his return to France and his house in Louveciennes, Pissarro discovered that much of the work in his studio had been destroyed by Prussian soldiers.
In 1872 Pissarro moved back to Pontoise, where he gathered a small circle of painters around him, including Guillaumin, and, most importantly, Cézanne, to whom Pissarro demonstrated his method of painting patiently from nature.
These lessons caused Cézanne to change his entire approach to art. Later, in 1902, he said of his mentor: "As for old Pissarro, he was a father to me, a man to consult and something like the good Lord".
The Impressionist years
In the early 1870s Pissarro devoted a great deal of thought to the idea of creating an alternative to the Salon, a plan he discussed with Monet, Renoir, and others. They devised the idea of a society with a charter based on that of a local bakers’ union, and by January 1874 Pissarro helped found a cooperative along these lines.
In April of that year the group held their first exhibition at the studio of the photographer Nadar in Paris, at 35 Boulevard des Capucines, a show that became known as the first Impressionist exhibition. Pissarro showed five paintings at the show, including Hoar Frost, The Old Road to Ennery, Pontoise (1873). Among those who also showed their work were Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Cézanne, Edgar Degas, and Berthe Morisot.
The Impressionist artists shared a desire to record the modern world around them by capturing the transient effects of light and colour. They generally avoided traditional modeling and compositions, focusing instead on texture, tone, and high-keyed colour.
Pissarro favoured rural subjects, rather than the modern urban subjects preferred by some of his colleagues, but he shared the other artists’ desire to paint the effects of light falling on objects.
His work from this early Impressionist period also displays the loose brushwork and absence of drawing that characterized other Impressionist art at the time.
Pissarro was very disappointed with the public and financial response to the first Impressionist exhibition.
He wrote bitterly to the critic Théodore Duret: "Our exhibition goes well. It is a success. The critics destroy us and accuse us of not having studied; I am returning to my work, it is better than reading the reviews".
The artist’s financial plight was desperate, and he was at a low ebb in his personal life: his nine-year-old daughter, Jeanne, had died a week before the exhibition opened.
Pissarro nonetheless remained certain that the group’s independent exhibitions represented the correct path forward. After exploring the idea of another alternative forum for exhibition, called the "Union", he rejoined the other founder-members of the Impressionist group and showed his work at the second group exhibition, held in April 1876 at the gallery of Durand-Ruel.
He showed 12 paintings-among them two painted at Montfoucault, the home of his friend Ludovic Piette-that included spring, summer, and winter landscapes. Once again, his work was criticized. Pissarro’s financial struggles were also increasingly acute.
Renoir recalled being turned down by one collector who said: "You are too late. Pissarro has just left, and I have taken a painting of his. A human consideration: he has such a large family. Poor chap!"
By the time of the fourth group show, in 1879, Renoir, Sisley, and Cézanne had withdrawn, and the following year Monet too was absent
Forced to reconsider the future of the exhibitions, Pissarro told the painter Gustave Caillebotte: ">We need men of talent-who are deserting us-[and] we also need new pictures... If the best artists slip away, what will become of our artistic union?" Pissarro’s qualms were realized: the sixth and seventh Impressionist exhibitions showed great rifts among the participants, particularly because Degas brought in many new artists. The open-minded Pissarro did not object to these new participants, however, reminding Caillebotte, who was vociferous in his opposition, that Degas had "brought to us Mlle [Mary] Cassatt, [Jean-Louis] Forain, and you [Caillebotte himself]".
Despite the problems plaguing the Impressionist exhibitions, Pissarro remained steadfast in his refusal to return to the Salon. His work during this period was dominated by figure studies, rather than pure landscapes, as seen in Young Peasant Woman Drinking Her Café au Lait (1881). Continuing his role as a mentor, Pissarro patiently worked with the flamboyant young artist Paul Gauguin during this period. His links with Degas and Cassatt were also strong, and together they embarked on a project to produce a monthly journal dedicated to prints entitled Le Jour et la nuit ("Day and Night"). The journal did not materialize, but Pissarro made some fine prints, and Degas wrote to their mutual friend, the printmaker Félix Bracquemond: "Pissarro is delightful in his enthusiasm and faith".
The crisis of Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism
In one of numerous letters to his son Lucien, part of a correspondence lasting 20 years (until Pissarro’s death), the artist wrote in 1883: "I will calmly tread the path I have taken, and try to do my best". It was difficult to remain calm, however. The collapse of the French economy in the early 1880s meant that Pissarro found it harder than ever to sell work, plus he had become uncertain about the direction his art was taking, using an increasingly small brushstroke and attempting to give his work a greater sense of structure.
In 1884 Pissarro moved from Pontoise to the tiny hamlet of Eragny, on the Epte River.
The following year he met the young avant-garde artists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac and became a convert to their new approach to painting, known as Neo-Impressionism. In accordance with this style, Pissarro applied paint to the canvas in dots of contrasting pigments, which the retina would perceive as a single hue.
Now in his fifties, Pissarro was still eager to reinvent his art, calling his former colleagues "romantics", in contrast to his new "scientific" Impressionist colleagues.
The eighth and last Impressionist exhibition in 1886 showed the lack of harmony among the remaining artists, as the work of the Neo-Impressionists was shown separately from that of the others.
Moreover, both Monet and Renoir were absent. Seurat showed his enormous A Sunday on La Grande Jatte-1884 (1884-86), which dominated the room that contained Pissarro’s own Neo-Impressionist submissions: nine oil paintings, among them View from My Window, Eragny-sur-Epte (1886–88), as well as gouaches, pastels, and etchings.
The Irish critic George Moore’s lack of comprehension of Pissarro’s new work was typical: "Owing to a long and intimate acquaintance with Pissarro and his work, I could distinguish between him and Seurat, but to the ordinary visitor, their pictures were identical".
Pissarro’s attraction to Neo-Impressionism was short-lived, and starting about 1889 he began to move away from the style, believing it made it "impossible to be true to my sensations and consequently to render life and movement".
At this point, the conditions in the art world that had once made the group exhibitions seem crucial had changed: new galleries were being established and showing the work of avant-garde artists, and, even without the stylistic splits between the painters, Impressionism had run its course. In the end, Pissarro was the only artist associated with the movement to have shown in all eight Impressionist exhibitions.
The last years: series paintings
By 1890 Pissarro believed that he at last understood how to attain the unity in painting he had pursued throughout his career.
He wrote about the genesis of this discovery to his niece Esther Isaacson: "I began to understand my sensations and to know what it was that I wanted to do when I was about 40 years old [in the 1870s]-but vaguely".
Others also recognized the development of his work since the height of Impressionism, including the dealer Georges Bernheim, who in 1891 wrote to Pissarro: "Your moment has come!" In 1892 Durand-Ruel held a large and successful retrospective of Pissarro’s work, and for the first time the artist achieved some financial stability.
At this point in his career, when his Impressionist colleagues such as Monet, Renoir, and Sisley were abandoning the subject of the city, Pissarro returned to it with several series of views of Paris, the first from a hotel window opposite the Gare Saint-Lazare, which was the station at which he arrived from Eragny.
He also painted serial views of the Rouen Cathedral and the seaport town of Le Havre, working on several canvases simultaneously-a practice also famously pursued by Monet later in his career. Pissarro’s later works are more freely painted than those of the Neo-Impressionist years, and he frequently used a vantage point of an upper-story window.
In these works he continued to pursue his long-standing quest to convey impressions of light and colour, but with the added notion that he needed to create more than one painting of each scene to explore and convey the changing effects of light and weather to the fullest extent.
He found the unity he had long sought by creating a harmony of colours and tones and by applying a consistent brushstroke across the entire surface of the canvas.
Assessment
Camille Pissarro was a major figure in the history of Impressionism. His continuing belief in the value of independent group exhibitions and his commitment to representing landscapes under specific weather and light conditions made him, in some ways, the quintessential Impressionist.
By the end of his life he was beginning to gain critical recognition and praise, an estimation that continued throughout the 20th century, when critics and scholars consistently acknowledged his place as a key figure in Impressionism.
Pissarro bridged the 19th and 20th centuries in his art and life. Despite his humble nature, Pissarro’s legacy-his unrelenting interest in change, his influence on seminal artists such as Cézanne and Gauguin, and his steadfast opposition to the artistic establishment-powerfully shaped the development of the early 20th-century avant-garde. | Kathleen Adler © Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Pissarro ‹pisaró›, Camille - Pittore (Saint-Thomas, Antille, 1830 - Parigi 1903). Tra i principali esponenti dell'impressionismo, ebbe un ruolo primario nell'organizzazione della prima mostra del movimento tenutasi nel 1874 a Parigi, partecipando poi, unico del gruppo, a tutte le successive. Poeta della campagna, egli rese con dolcezza i campi a primavera e in inverno, gli orti, la terra lavorata, la neve, la bonomia rustica.
Nessuno ha sentito più di P. nelle sue ultime opere la poesia agitata delle città: le sue Vues de Paris della collezione Durand-Ruel, le sue vedute di Londra, di Rouen, di Dieppe, sono ampie e delicate. Dipinse anche alcuni ritratti e molti acquerelli, ed eseguì anche acqueforti e litografie.
Dopo il 1885 condivise con i neoimpressionisti la tecnica divisionista e la ricerca di unità compositiva tramite il colore.
Vita
La sua inclinazione per il disegno fu stimolata dagli insegnanti della scuola di Passy, il sobborgo parigino dove il padre, commerciante israelita trasferitosi nel 1824 nell'isola antillana (allora colonia danese), lo mandò a studiare (1842-47); alla decisione di dedicarsi all'arte contribuì l'incontro, a Saint-Thomas, con il pittore danese Fritz Melbye, col quale si recò in Venezuela (1852-55).
Dal 1855 fu a Parigi: all'esposizione universale lo colpirono le opere di G. Courbet e, in particolare, quelle di C. Corot, che prese a frequentare e di cui si dichiarò allievo; all'Académie Suisse incontrò C. Monet e poi P. Cézanne.
Le sue opere furono spesso accettate ai Salons (ma nel 1863 figurò nel Salon des refusés).
Nel 1870 i Tedeschi saccheggiarono il suo studio di Louveciennes e da ciò dipende la rarità delle opere di P. anteriori a quell'epoca.
Nel 1872 dipinse a Auvers insieme con Cézanne.
Opere
I dintorni di Parigi (Montmorency, Louveciennes, Pontoise), i luoghi dove visse, preferiti da Corot e dai futuri impressionisti, sono i soggetti dei suoi quadri, composizioni fortemente strutturate e dai colori vivaci, stesi a volte con la spatola, subito apprezzati da É. Zola.
Allo scoppio della guerra franco-prussiana si rifugiò in Gran Bretagna (1870-71), dove si interessò a Constable e Turner; al ritorno fu al centro del gruppo definito poi scuola di Pontoise (Cézanne, A. Guillaumin, P. Gauguin) e giocò un ruolo primario nell'organizzazione della prima mostra (1874) degli impressionisti, partecipando poi a tutte le successive.
La pennellata si fa più leggera e la tavolozza più brillante, ma la composizione è sempre sostenuta da una struttura rigorosamente geometrica; il disegno continua a costituire lo strumento necessario d'approccio e di costruzione del quadro.;
Dopo il 1885 condivide con i neo-impressionisti la tecnica divisionista e la ricerca di un'unità compositiva attraverso il colore. Negli ultimi anni, i paesaggi, ripresi dalla finestra della sua casa di Eragny, le vedute di Parigi e di Rouen, dalla caratteristica vista dall'alto, sono elaborati in una tecnica pittorica più libera.
Ricche di notazioni sono le sue lettere e di estremo interesse è la sua opera grafica, sperimentata dal 1879 con H.-G.-E. Degas, dalla puntasecca all'acquatinta, dalla litografia al monotipo (le raccolte più significative sono nel Cabinet des étampes della Bibliothèque nationale di Parigi e nell'Ashmolean Museum di Oxford). | ©Treccani, Enciclopedia italiana
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