Camille Pissarro (1830-1903)
Jacob Camille Pissarro was born on July 10, 1830, to French Jewish parents on the West Indies island of St. Thomas. The family operated a dry goods store in what is now known as the Pissarro Building, 14 Dronnigens Gade in Queen's Quarter, Charlotte Amalie. At the time St. Thomas was inhabited
by a variety of peoples and diverse cultures, so that, as a boy, Camille learn to speak French at home as well as English and Spanish with the Negro population of the island.
Pissarro lived in St. Thomas until age 12, when he was sent to a boarding school in Paris. When he returned to St. Thomas in 1847 to work in his parents' store, he devoted all his spare time to making sketches, not only of coconut trees and other exotic plants, but also of the daily life surrounding him. His sketches included the donkeys and their carts on the sunny roads, the Negro women doing their washing on the beaches or carrying jugs, baskets, or bundles on their heads. From these sketches it was clear that he had a keen sense of observation. While supervising arrivals at the port, he always had his sketchbook with him and made many drawings of the animated life of the harbour with its sailboats gliding along over the water.
© Copyright 2005 Paul van Rensburg.
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During the Franco-Prussian War from 1870-1871, Pissarro lived in England and made a study of English art, particularly the landscapes of Joseph Mallord William Turner, which caused him to lighten his palette and formulate a technique of applying strokes of bright color to the canvas to create luminous effects. He never, however, abandoned an underlying sense of solid form and contour. Also, while in London, Pissarro met Paul Durand-Ruel, the Parisian dealer who would become an ardent supporter of Pissarro and his fellow Impressionists.
After his return to France, Camille Pissarro married Julie Vellay, a maid in his mother's household. Of their eight children together, one died at birth and a daughter died when nine. The surviving children all painted, and Lucien, the oldest son, became a follower of William Morris.
Pissarro settled in Pontoise, where he often received young artists seeking advice, including Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin.
Discouraged by their attempts to pass the critical scrutiny of the Salon juries, Pissarro joined Monet in 1874 for a project to organize independent exhibitions. Renoir, Sisley, Béliard, Guillaumin, Degas, Cézanne and Berthe Morisot were among those whose works were exhibited.
Pissarro and his fellows were met with severe opposition from critics. In a community that valued technical detail and photographic realism and expected the artist to idealize the subject, their work was seen as an absurdity and articles covering the exhibition coined the term "impressionist" as an insult. Artistic acceptance was slow to come, barely achieved in Pissarro's lifetime.
Through years of poverty and despair the impressionists laboured to gain a place in the world. Carrying their banner, Pissarro remained true to his vision. He experimented with theories of art; studied the effects of light, climate, and the seasons and adopted new techniques. From these he fused a style that remained his own, within the larger style of Impressionism.
In the 1880s, again becoming discouraged with his work, he experimented with pointillism. This new style, however, proved unpopular with collectors and dealers, and he returned to a freer impressionist style.
Pissarro was especially regarded as a teacher; he became the centre of a group of painters - Renoir, Monet, Degas, Cézanne - who respected his art and turned to him for inspiration. 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.” Pissarro did much to bring about the achievements of the Impressionists and he lived long enough to witness the start of the Impressionists’ fame and influence.
In his 74th year, Camille Pissarro had finally attained the respectability that had eluded him most of his life. His paintings were starting to fetch high prices at auction and a new generation of artists admired his work.
In the last years of his life, Pissarro experienced eye trouble, which forced him to abandon outdoor painting. He continued, however, to work in his studio until his death in Paris on November 13, 1903. He died of blood poisoning and was survived by sons Lucien, Georges, Félix, Ludovic-Rodolphe, Paul Emile; and daughter, Jeanne.
Known as the Father of Impressionism, Pissarro painted rural and urban French life, particularly landscapes in and around Pontoise, as well as scenes from Montmartre and street scenes in Paris, Le Havre, and London. He was a painter of sunshine and the scintillating play of light and his mature work also displayed an empathy for peasants and labourers.
Pissarro's influence on his fellow Impressionists is probably still underrated. Not only did he offer substantial contributions to Impressionist theory, but he also managed to remain on friendly, mutually respectful terms with such difficult personalities as Edgar Degas, Cézanne and Gauguin. Pissarro was the only impressionist artist to exhibit at all eight of the Impressionist exhibitions. Moreover, whereas Monet was the most prolific and emblematic practitioner of the Impressionist style, Pissarro was nonetheless a primary developer of Impressionist technique.
By 1852 his parents had become resigned to his ambition and pledged their support. He returned to St. Thomas, then left his Caribbean home for Paris to further his studies and ultimately pursue a career. He studied at various academic institutions (including the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Académie Suisse) and under a succession of masters, such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, and Charles-François Daubigny. Corot is often considered Pissarro’s most important early influence and Pissarro listed himself as Corot’s pupil in the catalogues to the 1864 and 1865 Paris Salons.
While Pissarro was accepted to show at the official Salon throughout the 1860s, he found no inspiration in the works of the masters and found it difficult to find a personal expression. He distanced himself from teachers Melbye and Corot and passed through a period of severe self-criticism until a chance meeting ensued with Monet and Cézanne,and through them, a network of acquaintances. These friendships brought new insight and encouragement and he was attracted towards the paintings of these artists whose work did not conform to widely accepted styles.
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,twenty miles from Paris, and started 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 colour in his expression of natural phenomena and employing smaller patches of paint.
As Pissarro could not obtain permission to devote himself to painting, he abandoned his comfortable bourgeois existence at the age of twenty-two and ran away after leaving a note for his parents. In the company of Fritz Melbye, a Danish painter from Copenhagen whom he had met while sketching in the port, he sailed to Caracas, Venezuela. Fritz Melbye thus became his first serious artistic influence under whose direction he produced paintings and watercolors, and made countless drawings in pencil, ink and wash; many of these annotated in Spanish with the signature Pizzarro.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/pissarro/
www.pissarro.vi/artist.htm
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Pissarro
www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_bio_127.html
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