Blessed
are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people
see nothing. ”
- Camille Pissarro
- Camille Pissarro
01 Two
Women Chatting by the Sea, St. Thomas (1856)
This
painting was completed the year after Pissarro settled in France. It
depicts two women walking along a seaside path in St. Thomas, the
Caribbean island where Pissarro was born. The purple hills that
extend from the left middle frame downward toward the ocean act as a
dividing line in the background, demonstrating the artist's ability to
merge the local colour of the Caribbean with the gentle colour
palette of the Barbizon School, the group of French painters who
first stressed the necessity of painting landscapes outdoors. Here,
the lessons Pissarro learned on direct observation in his early
studies in Paris allowed him to capture the effects of local,
tropical light on an outdoor scene, prefiguring his future as a
pivotal member of the Impressionist circle.
02 Jalais
Hill, Pontoise (1867)
Pontoise
was Pissarro's intermittent home northwest of Paris from 1866 to
1883, where he received and mentored Cézanne and Gauguin, among
others. This
painting
was
lauded by the French author and cultural critic Emile Zola as an
exemplary modern landscape depicting a "rare poem of life and
strength" following its exhibition in the Salon of 1868. "This
little valley, this hill have a heroic simplicity and forthrightness.
Nothing would be more banal were it not so grand," Zola wrote of
the manner in which Pissarro handled his rural subject matter.
Indeed, the positive reception of the painting by critics and writers
positioned Pissarro as an avant-garde painter in the second half of
the 19th century, though he would soon turn his back on the Salon
entirely, choosing to exhibit with the "Independent"
Impressionists.
03 The
Hermitage at Pontoise (c1867)
Pissarro
stripped his painting of the historical or sentimental over-tones
that characterised the landscapes of his immediate predecessors. And
he made magisterial use of light and dark, demonstrating more than a
mere interest in the effects of sun and shade.
04 Road
to Versailles at Louveciennes (1869)
For
a time in 1869, Pissarro settled in Louveciennes, a rural suburb
approximately 12 miles west of Paris. It was during this time period
that Pissarro developed his mature Impressionist style, which reached
its height in the mid-1870s. In this early Impressionist effort,
Pissarro captures a fleeting sensation of the winter season,
constructing his composition through the use of quick dashes of
colour. The long shadows cast on the new-fallen snow by passersby
explore the atmospheric effects of cold winter light. The freshness
and thickness of the brushstrokes, most easily identified in the
trees' branches and the colourful garments of the townspeople, are
the sort of constructive building blocks Pissarro would eventually
pass down to Cézanne. The more smoothly distributed paint of the sky
and the snow-covered ground demonstrate Pissarro's transformation of
Realist naturalism into what would become experimental, rough
Impressionism.
05 The
Entrance to the Village of Voisins (1872)
In
this painting, Pissarro has depicted a calm, sunny, early spring day.
The leaves are not yet out and the sun is still low, causing the tall
slim tree trunks to cast long shadows across the path. Pissarro has
achieved this view by lowering the horizon and exaggerating the
height of the trees in the foreground.
06 Self-Portrait
(1873)
More
than a simple fellow traveller of the Impressionist movement,
Pissarro was known by his artistic colleagues as a collaborator and
mentor. Because of his willingness to allow younger artists to live
with him for long periods of time to study and paint, and perhaps
also due to his role as a family man and father of his own brood of
eight children, he was affectionately referred to as "Père
Pissarro." In this classic self-portrait, he depicts himself as a
wise and respected paternal figure with his famous beard and his
lively, observant eyes, looking much like a grandfather or old sage,
despite being only 43 at the time. Indeed, Cézanne once wrote to his
friend, the art dealer Ambroise Vollard, "As for old Pissarro,
he was like a father to me. He was a man to be consulted, rather like
God."
07 Hoar Frost, the Old Road to Ennery, Pontoise (1873)
Considered
one of Pissarro's masterpieces, Hoar Frost
is
one of five paintings he exhibited at the first Impressionist
exhibition in 1874. Here, a peasant worker traverses a field in
Pissarro's home town at the time, Pontoise. The painting's emphasis
on colour harmony is an important antecedent to Neo-Impressionist
techniques, but his true achievement is bringing a focus on
composition to the Impressionist canvas. Cézanne famously said "We
must make of Impressionism something solid like the art of the
museum" in reference to the movement's lack of underlying
structure. Cézanne's mentor Pissarro, however, used tilled fields
crossed with foot-trampled paths and regularly spaced trees on a
horizon to create a balanced composition. The cool colour palette and
offset vanishing point fall comfortably into the rhythm of the
canvas, directing the viewer's attention to the wandering figure.
08 Bourgeois
House at L'Hermitage, Pontoise (1873)
While
there is little surprising about the composition here, the handling
of the paint is best described as exploratory. The short, crisp
brushstrokes of pure colour adopted by Pissarro during the early
1870s are now substituted by a looser, fussier manner of working that
has its logical conclusion in the canvases dating from the late
1870s.
09 Jeanne
Holding a Fan (1874)
Pissarro's
youngest daughter, Jeanne-Rachel, nicknamed "Minette," died
of tuberculosis at age eight after a short, sickly life. Though
Pissarro painted portraits of his wife and children in great numbers,
his matter-of-fact paintings of his daughter's slowly deteriorating
health are among his most poignant. In this portrait, painted in the
months preceding her death, Pissarro tellingly represents his
daughter sitting inside near a heating stove rather than playing
outdoors. She holds a Japanese fan: an object that at once suggests
her own beauty, preciousness, and delicacy, as well as her father's
love of Far Eastern art. Less an impression than a concrete
representation of a loved one, Pissarro nonetheless incorporates some
of the asymmetry of the Japanese woodblock prints that he and his
Impressionist colleagues enjoyed into the composition of this
painting, with the oddly angled chair and Minette's slightly
off-centre head tilt.
10 Portrait
of Paul Cézanne (1874)
Pissarro
painted this portrait in
his studio at Pontoise, where the two artists worked together in the
1870s. Contrary to the traditional portrait, Pissarro has not
glamorized his sitter. Cézanne is dressed in informal clothes,
similar to those he would have worn on their outdoor painting trips.
11 The
Pond at Montfoucault (1875)
It
was during his stay with his friend Ludovick Piette in 1874 that
Pissarro concentrated closely on the images of
peasant rural life. He made numerous paintings of female peasants
engaged in their daily routines.
12 The
Little Bridge, Pontoise (1875)
The
bridge in this painting stood in the grounds of the Château de
Marcouville. By calling it simply The Little Bridge, Pissarro has
chosen to avoid any suggestion of the grandeur associated with the
château. It seems logical to ask why he should have depicted a scene
which made it necessary for him to venture into the social territory
he abhorred. It is possible, and indeed probable, that he was
experimenting on a theme established by Gustave
Courbet
in
the 1860s.
13 The
Shaded Stream, (1865) by Gustave Courbet
Courbet
similarly depicted water running through the dense undergrowth of a
dark forest. In his own painting, some ten years later, Pissarro
recreated a very similar setting and feel also using a palette of
subdued greens and browns, applied in typical Courbet style with a
knife rather than a brush.
14 The
Red Roofs, a Corner of a Village, Winter Effect (1877)
In
this painting, we see a small cluster of houses through the trees of
an orchard. The buildings appear to be the subject of the painting,
but the cobweb of trunks and branches stops the eye from resting on
them for a second at a time. They physically block our view. Rather
than being able clearly to look through and see the houses, our eye
skids across the surface of the composition.
15 The
Cote des Boufs at L'Hermitage (1877)
Here,
Pissarro has moved slightly up the hill and to the left. We can see
that the building with the large brown roof and the small cream house
in front of it have moved diagonally down the composition to the
right, so that we see them from a slightly different angle. Here
again, Pissarro has studied the myriad pattern of trees on the
surface of the picture. The twisting branches in the foreground, and
the vertical trunks in the middle distance and background, distract
our eyes from the figures slowly walking through the undergrowth on
the left hand side.
16 Kitchen
Garden with Trees in Flower, Spring, Pontoise (1877)
Colour,
and the technique with which it has been applied, is significant
here. Rather than dragging the paint along the canvas to create a
smooth surface, Pissarro has quickly applied his brush, heavy with
individual colours, to form dashes of pure pigment. The build-up of
paint caused by this technique is so thick in parts, particularly in
the white blossom, that it stands out in relief from the surface of
the picture.
17 Rabbit
Warren at Pontoise, Snow (1879)
In this painting, snow covers the ground, houses, and vegetation in a
frothy coat that resulted from the artist's vigorous brushwork.
Throughout, small spots of colour in the chimneys, greenish shrubs,
and clothing of the man at right punctuate what is otherwise a
predominately yellowish white and untamed fragment of nature.
18 The
Outer Boulevards, Snow (1879)
In
the 1890s Pissarro would begin a series of paintings devoted to the
Parisian boulevards. This subject is therefore unusual in a work from
1879 and appears to be influenced by Claude
Monet's Boulevard des Capucines.
19 Boulevard
des Capucines (1873-1874) by Claude Monet
Although
both artists depicted a similar view, with an avenue of trees on the
left-hand side, the effect of each is very different. Monet's
boulevard is stylish and elegant while Pissarro's is grey and
miserable. Pissarro has created this effect in a number of ways. The
scene is definitely a cold one. The few figures on the street are
huddled in overcoats or under umbrellas, protecting themselves from
the elements. The small figure in the foreground, with his head bowed
and hands in his pockets, sums up the mood of the picture. Pissarro
is also able to exaggerate the gloomy effect by keeping his viewpoint
very close to the level of the street.
Applying
very little detail, Monet uses short, quick brushstrokes to create
the "impression" of people in the city alive with movement.
One critic was not pleased with these abstracted crowds, describing
them as "black tongue-lickings." The higher viewpoint of
the painting causes the eye to plunge
into the deep channel of the crowded street, seeking to disentangle
the clues to the complex visual experiences given by a myriad
detached brushstrokes. Fragmentation is also created by the double
perspective thrust formed by the apartment blocks on the left and by
the line of wintry trees and snow-topped cabs in the middle of the
composition. Monet has also isolated his figures on the snow-covered
pavements, but his brushstrokes fuse them into groups, just as a
crowd melds the movements of many individuals.
20 Landscape
at Chaponval (1880)
Until
now, Pissarro had been concerned with the recession of space and his
compositions had been carefully structured into the basic elements of
foreground, middle-ground and background, but here he pushes the
formation of horizontal bands to the extreme. Rather than giving an
illusion of reality and depth, the painting is almost abstract in its
composition. The bands made up of field, houses, hill and sky seem
almost to sit on top of one another, rather like the figures in a
medieval tapestry. The figure also seems to play a different role.
Rather than being merged into the landscape, the cow girl and her
charge stand resolutely in the central foreground and demand our
attention. Pissarro's use of blue was also significant in his
approach to the abstract, and caused a certain reaction from the
critics. Not only are the sky and girl's dress blue, but so too are
the roofs of the houses.
21 The
Harvest (1882)
The
Harvest was one of the thirty-six works that Pissarro chose to
exhibit at the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition in which all the
mainstream Impressionists were represented, with the exception of
Degas.
By carefully positioning his figures on and around the receding lines
of piles of hay, Pissarro has created a peaceful and rhythmical
composition. Eight figures, four men and four women, are preparing
the harvest. The concentration of figures on the left-hand side
causes an imbalance in the composition, thus making our eye fix
immediately on the standing woman wearing a red headscarf. The bushel
of hay she carries is placed at an angle, leading from the corner of
the picture and pointing towards the wide, open landscape on the
right-hand side.
22 The
Little Country Maid (1882)
Pissarro
has depicted an apparently simple, domestic interior. A maid is
quietly brushing the floor, while a small child seated at a table
eats his breakfast. Although the composition focuses on a figure
involved in a physical action, the scene is totally static. The
moment has been held, rather like a snapshot. Pissarro has achieved
this stillness by surrounding the figures in the picture with a
variety of inanimate, recurring shapes. The circular forms of the
teapot and cup and saucer are reflected in the round curve of the
table, the chair backs and the waist and skirt of the maid. The
strong vertical lines of the doorway are reinforced by the legs of
the chair in the foreground and the parallel sides of the picture
frames, while the whole is anchored by the diagonal brush handle. The
immobility of these objects and their careful placement in
conjunction with each other lend a static quality to the figures,
making the painting literally a still-life.
23 Woman
and Child at the Well (1882)
The
apparent subject of this painting is an idle moment shared by the two
figures in the foreground. Their contrasting poses juxtapose the
strains of physical labour with the innocent exuberance of childhood.
A peasant woman slouches listlessly beside the watering cans she must
fill before rejoining the other women in the far background, who
diligently irrigate rows of young vegetables in the garden beside the
farmhouse. Her exhaustion from this strenuous task is evident as she
slumps back against the wall of the well while gazing blankly at a
child who, oblivious to the woman's toils, raises its hand
whimsically to its mouth.
24 Hay
Harvest at Eragny (1887)
Here,
Pissarro's short, dashed brushstrokes recall something akin to
Pointillism, weaving together landscape and figures. He studied the
effects of seasonal conditions on colour, depicting the varying
seasons and creating multiple paintings of the same subject at
different times of the year. The painting is carefully structured by
the semicircle of hay bales and the sharp diagonals of the workers'
tools, which coax the eye to meander into the luminous fields in the
distant background. While the clothing is that of the French
countryside, the figures themselves and their peaceful surroundings
achieve a certain universality through the absence of recognizable
landmarks and the anonymity with which he paints the peasants' facial
features.
25 Two
Young Peasant Women (1892)
A
late manifestation of Pissarro's favourite theme, this painting
depicts two young, female peasants taking a moment away from their
work. Facing one another, the women are shown from an offset
viewpoint that catches one in profile and the other from slightly
above. The sky that takes up as much as a third of the canvas in his
other landscapes is compressed into ten percent of the painted space,
and the receding foreground is flattened to near two-dimensionality
behind the closely positioned figures. This atypical angle shows the
effects of Pissarro's experimental foray into printing, where, with
Degas, he explored the dynamic compositional techniques of Japanese
woodblock printmakers. Pissarro used these techniques here to emphasize the
labourer's value in society at a time when France, and especially
Paris, was rapidly industrializing and modernizing. In doing so,
Pissarro spent his later life focused on presenting the pastoral
values of a rural life that were being slowly eroded.
26 Pont
Boieldieu in Rouen, Rainy Weather (1896)
This
is one of a series of works Pissarro painted of Pont Boieldieu in
Rouen and the industrial quays surrounding it. Since his room at the
Hôtel de Paris overlooked the Seine, he was able to execute this
painting from this vantage point. The subject is the Pont Boieldieu,
an iron bridge completed a few years before in 1885. The painting
shows Pissarro's interest in moving beyond traditional landscape
paintings of verdant rural scenes. His Rouen series instead focuses
on the bustle of the modern city. Pissarro deliberately sought out a
view of the busy industrial section of the town, and produced a
number of paintings of the view from the hotel in different light
conditions and different weather. In a letter written that year,
Pissarro himself describes the painting: "The theme is the
bridge near the Place de la Bourse with the effects of rain, crowds
of people coming and going, smoke from the boats, quays with cranes,
workers in the foreground, and all this in grey colours glistening in
the rain."
He
further wrote, "What particularly interests me is the motif of
the iron bridge in wet weather with all the vehicles, pedestrians,
workers on the embankment, boats, smoke, haze in the distance: it's
so spirited, so alive".
27 Boulevard
Montmartre, Afternoon Sun (1897)
Pissarro's
career, which spanned nearly four decades in and around Paris, saw
great changes in the makeup of the city. City planner Georges-Eugene
Haussmann's renovations (1853-70) broadened Paris's avenues, and the
liberalization of Parisian labour laws during those years allowed for
greater free time to the average citizen. As a devoted anarchist,
Pissarro surely applauded this opening up of everyone's creative
leisure time. In this late-career hybrid of Pissarro's many artistic
styles (Realism in its underlying composition and depiction of cloud
formations; Impressionism in its snapshot quality; and
Neo-Impressionism in its use of complementary colours to heighten
visual sensation), he celebrates the city's modernity in one masterly
canvas. On the main street in the neighbourhood of Montmartre, a
famed Impressionist haunt, Pissarro indicates a freedom of both
physical and social mobility through his emphasis on the breadth of
the street, the openness of the sky, and the bustle of the people and
carriages that characterise the City of Lights.
28 Boulevard
des Italiens, Morning, Sunlight (1897)
For
several years, Pissarro had been studying the way in which a scene
could be totally transformed by introducing figures going about their
everyday activities. Here we see a view of the Boulevard des Italiens
looking down from his window at the Grand Hôtel de Russie. We are
faced with a typical view of Parisian society: people walking, window
shopping, riding on or queuing for horse-driven omnibuses. The static
elements of the landscape are transformed by the bustling activity of
the crowd.
29 The
Avenue de l'Opera, Sunlight, Winter Morning (1898)
The
painting has a blond tonality, and the sharp morning light is
filtered across the composition from behind the spectator. The shadow
of the hotel is in the foreground. Where the light is at its most
intense, the brushwork is at its most free.
30 Hay
Harvest at Eragny, 1901
Pissarro
started concentrating on rural life in 1875. In the beginning, his
peasants and cow girls were generally merged into their natural
surroundings, but here they are placed well into the foreground, so
that the picture is considered a composition of figures rather than a
landscape. The five women in the foreground are very carefully
positioned. The three standing figures are placed at intervals with
the bending figures between them, creating a rhythmical continuity
across the surface of the painting. This serene and undulating
composition no longer illustrates the sociological commentaries
typical of Pissarro's earlier works. Rather, it is an idealized view
of a harmonious rural world.
1830-1903
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