Camille Pissarro: A Painter of Two Worlds
While Monet, Renoir and Cézanne are often written about as the Impressionist pioneers, Camille Pissarro is another artist who should be remembered alongside them. This painter from the West Indies, known as the “Father of Impressionism,” was the only one to take part in all eight Impressionist displays.
Long stroy short, in this article we are going to discover 11 of his most famous works, and why he is considered as the Father of Impressionism.
1. White Frost in 1873
Source — “White Frost” by Camille Pissarro [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. Despite initial criticism, the work received significant attention during the exhibition and is one of five Paintings he displayed in 1874. The representation of a winter scene, even with its warmer color palette and abbreviated brushwork, was pretty groundbreaking at the time. hr #rtists with new conventions and seeded a course for the art of the future.
2. Landscape at Chapponval, 1880
At the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition in April 1879, Paris (thirty-eight paintings): seven by Camille Pissarro (the only artist to show at every one of the seven Impressionist Exhibitions); five by Cassatt; four apiece by Cézanne and Guillaumin; three each from Morisot and Degas; two from Monet; and six more from other artists. Well known artists such as Renoir, Sisley and Cézanne refused to participate because they felt the press was not giving them enough credit. Pissarro continued his end out of group loyalty, thankfully not alone as he did in 1870, only singing more than those who trespassed on his commitment in 1880 and 1881. At this point, Pissarro began to rethink his painting technique and turned to a more abstract style. His horizontal bands and vertical lines softened the edges of a number of conspicuous shapes (G290) in Landscape at Chapponval, another loss for the earlier structure that represented vivid blue tones with many critics.
3. Portrait of Paul Cezanne, 1874
In 1861, while touring the studios of Paris, Camille Pissarro noticed the work of a young Paul Cézanne. Pissarro observed a quiet and desperate pupil, took him for insight and gave him trust, leading to an acquaintance that was pivotal to nineteenth-century fine art. Pissarro and Cézanne would reciprocally influence each other, with Paul Cezanne teaching Pissarro a thing or two. The portrait that Pissarro painted of Paul Cézanne was made in the workshop they shared in Pontoise during the 1870s. Unlike old-school portraiture, Pissarro represented Cézanne in the same kind of clothes he wore in plein air sessions. While Pissarro and Cézanne painted one another countless numbers of times, this is said to be the first portrait that Pissarro did of Cézanne. Although unsigned and left unfinished (particularly in the unpainted lower portion), the painting is dated 1874. There is a clue in the upper left-hand corner of the painting, where political caricature Adolphe Thiers, head of the French government at that time, was published in L’Eclipse on August 4th, 1874.
4. Woman and Child at the Well, 1882
Single figures are painted in Woman and Child at the Well, here a reflection of Pissarro’s enduring fascination with the daily lives of peasants, as well as his move to make the rural Éragny village Camille Pissarro had just settled into with his family home in 1883. Possibly shown in the scenario are Ludovic Rodo Pissarro, Pissarro’s fourth son and a home domestic servant. Above all, picture single still life a weary laboring woman resting among the water jugs as an innocent youth touches their mouth, oblivious to the mothers fatigue The dense space, and loose malleable thickness of the paint especially in the foreground, are typical of Pissarro at this moment, as is negative display against white paper. As his Impressionist peers shifted their creative focus, Pissarro determined to prove that he was a skilled large-format figure painter. But by blending human act and the cycles of nature, here he calls to mind Millet influence in balancing level of focus between humans the lush greenery.
5. Boulevard Montmartre at Night
It is a stark representation of Parisian city life, and was completed during the end of Pissarro ‘s working carrier when he started doing exploit urban scenes having prior generally painted rustic landscape. This is one of the views of the Boulevard Montmartre that Vincent also painted from his room at the Grand Hôtel de Russie, in 1897, but this time on a rainy night. Pissarro became interested in the street itself, awash with lights bouncing off rain-slick cobblestones made of shimmering greys and blues, which he delineated with thick brushstrokes. The painting in question beautifully brings the eyes of the spectator along the streets fading lines, lit with street lamps and reflections on wet cobbles from passing carriages. The buildings are abstracted — their representation is a stark black line against a white background, contrasting strong light and shadow. This piece is different; the quick, brief marks more like an oil sketch that quickly recorded the passing lights and silvery reflections instead of the thick impasto that fills most of Pissarro’s works. Ahead of us is one of the supreme night scenes in Impressionism, Boulevard Montmartre at Night; a chain of lamps receding from our eye across an expanse … of delicate snow capped with frosty silver above the dark trudging drop-stitches of winter trees matted down and obscured by a square print texture/photoshop effect which makes them seem almost close to being cut paper, like Matisse but oh so twilit and second derivative beyond ever cutting too far into regolith.
6. The Avenue de l’Opera, Sunlight, Winter Morning, 1898
At the end of 1897, Camille Pissarro rented a room at the Hôtel du Louvre from which he jutted out over the Rue Saint-Honoré, and could look far down both the Avenue de l’Opéra and into the Place du Théâtre Français. These open and liberal scenes offering no support like those enclosed funnel views of the Boulevard Montmartre posed new problems. Pissarro negotiated light and movement beautifully in his painting of the Place du Théâtre Français. The architecture and the hurrying avenue pronounces a stable base for the composition, but Pissarro manages to work successfully with all degrees of difficulty level when it comes to moving traffic and passers-by coming from various sides. The painting has a warm, blonde tonality and bright morning light flooding the scene (hence the title); where this light is most intense (especially in the trees), Pissarro uses his brushwork more loosely than usual to capture something of that life and movement inherent in this city.
7. The Red Roofs, a Corner of a Village, Winter Effect, 1877
In The Red Roofs, Corner of a Village, Winter Effect Pissarro represents an ideal small group of homes inside a plantation that are incompletely disguised among the molten metal support network of tree trunks and limbs which makes for one trying to keep clientes eye pinned the structures. That ridge creates an obstacle for the eye to follow more smoothly over the surface of the composition. Larger Côte des Boeufs at L’Hermitage near Pontoise, in which the point of view is slightly higher up the hill than in—Pissarro has already chosen a somewhat elevated angle looking down on the houses. Like the previous image, this one takes away from the figures walking amongst the shrubs on the left by drawing attention to its lacework of trees with sinuous branches and upright trunks.
8. Boulevard des Italiens, Morning, Sunlight, 1897
Like Monet with his Haystacks and Waterlilies series, the finest Impressionism came in Pissarro’s late 1890s Paris paintings like Boulevard Montmartre, Gare Saint-Lazare and Jardin des Tuileries. A December 2014 New Yorker article by Peter Schjeldahl, “Urban Nature: Pissarro’s World,” mentions that the artist is known mostly for his country scenes but that he focused in several works on views of the city showing “the identical stretch at different weather and daytime hours. Pissarro gave richly detailed portrayals of Parisian life in tableaux such as this image), a view of the Boulevard des Italiens from his room at the Grand Hotel de Russie, Though the bustling crowd of shoppers, strollers and horse-drawn omnibuses might have angered a sleeping landscape.
9. The Great Bridge in Rouen, Rainy Weather, 1896
Pissarro had a gallery in 1896 of remarkable paintings, derived from his observation of an issue of the famous series paintings by Claude Monet’s, showing the harbor and bridges of Rouen. That year he made two visits to Rouen in search of a breath of fresh air. October 30, Rouen: He painted The Great Bridge at Rouen, Rainy Weather, during his second visit of some two months to the Normandy seaport while lodged at the Hotel d’Angleterre. The painting shows a vibrant port scene with sailors, heavy traffic, and smoking chimneys. Witold Bardach and Litina we abandoned by the end of the second departure of Pissarro; 28 paintings were completed in Rouen.
10. La Récolte des Foins, Éragny, 1887
La Récolte des Foins, Éragny depicts the bustling haying season at Éragny where Pissarro lived with his family from 1884 until his death in 1903. Pissarro, who was never still and always seeking to try something different in his later years found a subject he would continue off and on for the next 15 months using pointillism in this piece. He heightened the saturation and contrast through precisely placed strokes and dots, thus striking a harmonious constitution in which he demonstrates mastery of color and light.
11. Kitchen Garden with Trees in Flower, Spring, Pontoise, 1877
The color and technique in Pissarro’s Kitchen Garden with Trees in Flower, Spring, Pontoise (1877). Rather than labouring over the paint slowly and heavy to get a nice smooth surface, he painted fast making discrete marks of pure pigment. This in turn has given a surface feeling textured with some part of texture bits especially were he lay down the white flowers such that th knot of paint laid as relief on top of canvas.
References
- https://www.camillepissarro.org/landscape-at-chaponval.jsp
- https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/camille-pissarro-1776
- https://www.artnet.com/artists/camille-pissarro/
