On his return to France Pissarro moved back to Pontoise, farther from Paris. The region was already populated with artists, and he had remarkable neighbours: Daumier’s house was just near Pontoise, in Valmondois, and Daubigny lived in the village of Auvers, frequently visited by his close friend Corot. Pissarro had boundless respect for all of them. Another remarkable person lived in Auvers, Dr. Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, who treated painters, went to their favourite cafés, and bought their paintings. In addition, during the 1870s a man of thirty from the south of France arrived there, Paul Cézanne. He settled in Auvers and began to paint in the open air together with Pissarro.
122. Camille Pissarro,
The Donkey Ride at La Roche-Guyon, 1864-1865.
Oil on canvas, 35 x 51.7 cm.
Private Collection, London.
123. Camille Pissarro, The Pond at Montfoucault, 1875.
Oil on canvas, 73.6 x 92.7 cm.
The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham.
When Pissarro was in Paris Cézanne and his oldest son Lucien wrote to him with news of the family in Pontoise. Pissarro taught Cézanne to lighten his palette, and only to paint with the three primary colours and their nearest derivative colours. Pissarro also had a teacher’s eye, and knew how to evaluate talent in others. He wrote to Duret from Pontoise, telling of Paul Cézanne’s “very strange studies, uniquely visualised” (L. Venturi, op. cit. vol. 1, p. 37), and told him that this young painter from Provençe had surpassed all his expectations: his paintings were amazingly powerful and energetic.
Later, Cézanne said Pissarro was like a father to him, and more – like a benevolent God. Beginning in 1879 another habitual guest of the Pissarro family’s was Paul Gaugin, then still only an amateur painter and collector. In the environs of Pontoise and Auvers Pissarro painted meadows and ploughed fields without end – simple, unpretentious motifs, most often in connection with peasants labouring.
The year of the first Impressionist exhibition he was essentially painting in only a single tonality, his work was not yet completely free of Corot’s influence. In 1869 or 1870, in Landscape in the Vicinity of Louveciennes, Autumn (Malibu, The J. Paul Getty Museum), Pissarro had painted backyards and kitchen gardens, instead of poetic paths and the mirror of the water. One of Pissarro’s best landscapes appeared at the first exhibition in Nadar’s studio in 1874: Hoarfrost (Paris, Musée d’Orsay), in which the motif is completely devoid of any charm whatsoever. He painted a gentle, even slope, with little twisted trees and the figure of a peasant bending under the weight of a bundle of firewood. Still, it is here that Pissarro’s special poetry reveals itself. The golden colour range, which joins the earth and the sky, gives the impression of gentle sunlight and the whitish veil of the morning frost. For his landscape motif in this painting, before Monet and Sisley, Pissarro chose a scene in nature that was about to change the very next moment.
Nevertheless, around the time of the first exhibition Pissarro had already found his own vision of nature, which made him distinct from his landscape-painter friends. In Pissarro’s painting objects do not as a rule dissolve into the surrounding air and become shimmers of colour.
Pissarro was convinced of the need for his group of friends to carve out an independent niche. Among the future Impressionists he was one of the most courageous. In 1874 Pissarro took an active part in organising their first exhibition. During discussions over its organisation he insisted on the need for creating a cooperative. As an example he proposed the bylaws of the bakers’ union, which he had learned of in Pontoise. He also proposed a system in which each of the painters would be well positioned when the time came to hang the paintings. To avoid conflicts Pissarro thought it necessary to determine by lot where each painting would be hung. But all these proposals were rejected: they seemed too radical to the other painters.
This also goes far to explain why Pissarro was the only one among the group of Impressionists to inherit Millet’s rural motifs. Since his youth he had worked at nurturing the landscape painter within him, and had some success in this: it was also the genre to which all his friends were devoting themselves. For a certain time Pissarro was very interested in the social theories of the anarchists, but for him the truth to be found in art outweighed all others.
124. Camille Pissarro, Lordship Lane Station, Dulwich, 1871.
Oil on canvas, 44.5 x 72.5 cm.
Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London.
125. Camille Pissarro, Passage aux Pâtis, Pontoise, 1868.
Oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm.
Private Collection, New York.
In all, Pissarro showed several dozen of his landscapes at every Impressionist exhibition until the eighth and last, in 1886. He was the only one to take part in all of their group exhibitions, and never again to submit his works to the Salon. He painted flowering fields and ploughed fields, the bare branches of trees in winter, apple trees blossoming impulsively, and light blue shadows and pink light on the snow. The Road to Ennery near Pontoise (Paris, Musée d’Orsay) inevitably brings to mind Sylvestre’s reference to Pissarro’s “naïvete.” Amidst the gently sloping, seldom varying hills that he never tired of painting, little figures appear on the country paths: two travellers on horse carts, a peasant with a sack on his shoulders, and two women wearing hats. It is a world that is real and childlike at the same time, as in the works of naïve painters.
Pissarro dearly loved Paris, and visited when he could, but his poverty and his work with rural landscapes kept the family in the provinces. They had six children, and later lost one of their daughters. Country life was far less expensive and the painter’s wife made things somewhat easier by growing vegetables and raising hens and rabbits. In 1882 the Pissarro family moved to the small village of Osny, about three miles from Pontoise, where they could live even more simply. The painter believed his financial situation was somewhat stable now. “I’m not being ‘showered with gold,’ as the romantics say,” he wrote to Duret. “I’m enjoying the fruits of modest, but consistent sales” (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 62). In September he even decided to make a journey through the Aube region and the Côte d’Or, hoping to find new motifs. In 1884 Pissarro again moved a bit farther north to Éragny on the Epte River, this same little river on whose banks sat Claude Monet’s Giverny. He settled into a very large but simple farmhouse right on the river bank, facing the village of Bazincourt. The meadows and gently sloping hills of Éragny served as Pissarro’s “studio”, as did the meadows of Giverny for Claude Monet. Like all the Impressionists Pissarro worked devotedly, in the rain as well as on days with frost.
126. Camille Pissarro, Le Carrefour, Pontoise, 1872.
Oil on canvas, 55 x 94 cm.
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.
Occasionally Pissarro travelled to London, Brussels, or Rouen. This very lively city, with its port, appealed to him. He painted Rouen for the first time in 1883, then returned there several times in 1896. Settled in the Hotel D’Angleterre, he told his son that the view from his window, on the mezzanine, was magnificent. In this letter he is, in fact, outlining a program for urban landscapes that he meant to implement in his painting point for point during the last years of his life. The best view of the Great Bridge was from the windows of the Hotel d’Angleterre, and Pissarro painted it enthusiastically (The Great Bridge, Rouen).
No matter what Pissarro’s attitude might be towards his motif, it remained that of an Impressionist and the role of weather was in no way least important for him. “The Sun! It’s a rare delicacy at the moment.” (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 41). For an Impressionist painter, painting a landscape from a window was the same as working in the open air.
127. Camille Pissarro,
The Diligence on the Road from Ennery
to l’Hermitage, Pontoise, 1877.
Oil on canvas, 46.5 x 55 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
128. Camille Pissarro,
The Seine River and the Louvre, 1903.
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sp; Oil on canvas, 46 x 55 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
129. Camille Pissarro, The Great Bridge, Rouen, 1896.
Oil on canvas, 74 x 92 cm.
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.
In 1885 Pissarro met Seurat and Signac. For a short interval he and his son Lucien adhered to their “pointillist”, “neo-Impressionist style,” and both began to paint using small, juxtaposed touches of colour. In the beginning Pissarro was captivated by the way Seurat tackled the lessons of classical art and the science of colour. Pissarro was a man of many enthusiasms, and remained young all his life because of his temperament. He painted a whole series of Pointillist works in the manner of Seurat and Signac, but in 1888 he began to caution Signac about the dangers of following “Pointillism” blindly. On that basis he came to the conclusion that “Pointillism” wasn’t right for him, since the impression it produced had a lifeless monotony to it.
During the 1890s Pissarro was forced to interrupt his work in the countryside: due to an eye disease he could no longer work in the open air. In Paris he made a great many prints and painted fans – this brought in a bit of money. At the end of the century there was a craze for Japanese style – “le japonisme”, which was one of the decorative elements of “Art Nouveau” ornamentation. Pissarro drew these fans on Japanese paper, and the influence of the Japanese masters is evident.
130. Camille Pissarro, Rue de l’Épicerie, Rouen
(Effect of Sunlight), 1898.
Oil on canvas, 81.3 x 65.1 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
131. Camille Pissarro,
Place du Théâtre-Français, Spring, 1898.
Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 81.5 cm.
The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
132. Camille Pissarro,
Place du Théâtre-Français, Paris: Rain, 1898.
Oil on canvas, 73.6 x 91.4 cm.
Minneapolis Institute of Fine Arts, Minneapolis.
In the 1890s Pissarro began to paint the Parisian landscapes that were to assure his reputation as an urban landscape painter. He painted close to the window, in the same manner as in Rouen or the open air of the countryside. He began and completed his landscape in just one session, like in the outdoors, and all the while his eyes were protected from exposure to the wind. He had previously painted isolated urban views on occasion: Boulevard Rochechouart in 1878, and a snowy effect in The Outer Boulevards, also from 1878. Now he painted Rue Saint-Lazare. Trains starting out from Éragny arrived at Saint-Lazare station, and Pissarro usually entered the city by this route. From this window he began to paint the long ribbon of broad boulevards that follow one upon another, in different weather, in different situations, and at different times of the day. He wanted to see the crowds on holiday from above, which would introduce a new rhythm and new colour into the landscape. Pissarro would prepare a canvas with the perspective of the boulevard, then paint it during the moment he wished to set down on this canvas. He painted a total of fifteen variations using Boulevard Montmartre. Certain canvases were of the everyday boulevard, on workdays, with the vehicles coming and going, while on the sidewalks the dark stream of unhurried pedestrians flowed by (Boulevard Montmartre. Sun in the Afternoon, Saint Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum). In others, this same boulevard is flooded with a stream of bright colours: it is the Carnival celebration going by.
133. Camille Pissarro,
Woman Bathing her Feet in a Brook, 1894-1895.
Oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.
In this series Pissarro continued and elaborated on the image of the new Paris of their time, which Monet had begun in his Boulevard des Capucines (Moscow, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts). The point of view looking down on the city permitted Pissarro to use new composition methods, which the Impressionists had learned from the model of Japanese prints. If he painted a street that went on for a distance, the perspective remained a classical, linear one. If he was looking out from his attic at the Théâtre Français, it would spread out over the canvas on one plane only, right to its upper edge, leaving no space for the sky. Though, in a Pissarro, these figures are most often done with two or three touches of paint, as if carelessly applied to the canvas, each of them precisely renders the characteristic movement of a pedestrian (Place du Théâtre-Français, Paris, Los Angeles, County Museum of Art). After Monet’s series of “Stations” and “Rouen Cathedrals”, Pissarro’s urban series finally appeared in the exhibitions: twelve “Alleys” and seven or eight “Boulevards.” At the dawn of the twentieth century Pissarro painted the Tuileries Gardens, from an attic as always. In 1901 Pissarro worked in Dieppe. In this old maritime city he saw the natural context he needed: the lively activity of the colourful crowd at a fair around the huge Gothic cathedral (The Fair at Dieppe. Sunshine, Morning, Saint Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum). In July 1903 he stayed at the Hotel Saint-Siméon in Normandy, the previous site of a farm which had been a meeting place for Courbet, Daubigny, Jongkind, Boudin, and Monet. Le Havre, on the other hand, inspired him. The old Impressionist, whom life had taught wisdom, was no longer interested in the details of the landscape. He sought to penetrate to what was essential, which is what he had aspired to throughout his life as a painter. “I only see patches of colour now,” he said. “When I begin a painting, the first thing I try to get down is the accord. Between the sky, and the land and this water, there is necessarily a relationship of accord, and that is the great problem in painting (…) The great problem to resolve is to bring everything, even the smallest details of the painting, back into harmony with the ensemble, by which I mean the accord (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 101). Pissarro’s last apartment in Paris was on the Quai Voltaire. His last landscapes represent the perspective of the dock, slightly curved in a circular arc, with the dome of the Institut de France, the booksellers’ stalls, and the hurried passersby. This is where the painter died on 13 November 1903.
In a letter written 22 September 1903, shortly before his death, Pissarro bemoaned the fact that art lovers were not pressing to buy the paintings of the Impressionists. “It will take some more time for even our friends to understand us.” It was only later that evaluations of the history of Impressionism granted Pissarro the position that was his due: Georges Lecomte characterised him as the founder of Impressionism, and Thadée Natanson, editor of La Revue Blanche, called him the “apostle of Impressionism.”
134. Camille Pissarro, Hay Harvest at Éragny, 1901.
Oil on canvas, 53.9 x 64.7 cm.
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
135. Edgar Degas, Four Dancers, c.1903.
Pastel. Private Collection.
136. Edgar Degas, Dancers in the Wings, 1880.
Pastel and tempera on paper, mounted to paperboard,
69.2 x 50.2 cm. Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena.
EDGAR DEGAS
Degas was closest to Renoir in the Impressionist’s circle, for both favoured the animated Parisian life of their day as a motif in their paintings. Degas did not attend Gleyre’s studio; most likely he first met the future Impressionists at the Café Guerbois. It is not known exactly where he met Manet. Perhaps they were introduced to one another by a mutual friend, the engraver Félix Bracquemond, or perhaps Manet, struck by Degas’ audacity, first spoke to him at the Louvre in 1862. Two months later Degas exhibited his canvases with Claude Monet’s group, and became one of the most loyal of the Impressionists: not only did he contribute works to every one of their exhibitions except the seventh, he also participated very actively in organising them. All of which was curious, because he was distinct in many ways from the other Impressionists.
Edgar Degas came from a completely different milieu than did Monet, Renoir and Sisley. His grandfather René-Hilaire de Gas, a grain merchant, had been forced to flee from France to Italy in 1793 during the French Revolution. Business prospered for him there. After establishing a bank in Napl
es, de Gas wed a young girl from a rich Genoan family. Degas preferred to write his name simply as Degas, although he happily maintained relations with the numerous de Gas family relatives in Italy. Enviably stable by nature, he spent his entire life in the neighbourhood where he was born. He scorned and disliked the Left Bank, perhaps because that was where his mother had died. In 1850 Edgar Degas completed his studies at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and in 1852 received his degree in law. Because his family was rich, his life as a painter unfolded far more smoothly than did that of the other Impressionists.
He started his apprenticeship in 1853 at the studio of Louis-Ernest Barrias and, beginning in 1854, studied under Louis Lamothe, who revered Ingres above all others and transmitted his adoration for this master to Edgar Degas. Degas’ father was not opposed to his son’s choice. On the contrary: when, after the death of his wife, he moved to Rue Mondovi, he set up a studio for Edgar on the fourth floor, from which the Place de la Concorde could be seen over the rooftops. Edgar’s father was himself an amateur painter, and a connoisseur. He introduced his son to his many friends. Among them were Achille Deveria, curator of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Bibliothèque Nationale, who permitted Edgar to copy from the drawings of the Old Masters there: Rembrandt, Dürer, Goya, Holbein. His father also introduced him to his friends in the Valpinçon family of art collectors, at whose home the future painter met the great Ingres. All his life Degas would remember Ingres’ advice as one would remember a prayer: “Draw lines (…) Lots of lines, whether from memory or from life” (Paul Valéry, “Écrits sur l’Art” [“Writings on Art’], Paris, 1962, p. 187).
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