Camille Pissarro (1830-1903)
Camille was born in St. Thomas in the West Indies, where his father was a prosperous merchant. He was educated at Paris and returned to St. Thomas after his education but was not interested in the family business. He spent his time learning how to paint and sketch. Later, he worked with Danish painter Fritz Melbye in Venezuela.
He worked under Corot at the Academy Suisse where he met Manet, Monet and probably Courbet and Cezanne. This experience was a major influence in his style of painting. Corot helped him improve his lighting and coloring techniques. In 1855, he moved to France. He began sketching landscapes in small towns and
villages near Paris. His early works were praised by critics but he still remained rather unsuccessful and was forced to earn a living painting shades and fans.
Pissarro subsequently joined the impressionists. From the late 1860s he was a major figure of what was soon to become the Impressionist circle.
He was still developing his technique and during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), he lived in England and studied English art, particularly the landscapes of Joseph Mallord William Turner. For a time in the 1880s
Pissarro, discouraged with his work, experimented with pointillism the new style, however, proved unpopular with collectors and dealers, and he returned to what he found to be a freer impressionist style.
In France, he exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and subsequently exhibited at all 8 Impressionist exhibitions (1874-86) which he largely organized. Despite great poverty he refused to seek Salon recognition.
In the 1880s, Pissarro joined a younger generation of artists, including Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, and his own son Lucien, in adopting the Neo-Impressionist technique, which used the claims of science to support a new style of painting. He later
abandoned this technique and returned to his roots. He then began to paint city scenes that depicted life in Paris.
Pissarro continued to paint until his death in 1903.
His works
Although Pissarro experimented with different styles, his masterpieces are purely Impressionistic. 'The Red Roofs' is one such work. The use of color and lighting produces a unique effect. It is different from some of his other works during the same period such as 'Orchard at
Pontoise' because instead of stressing on low tones, he has chosen to express the brilliance of light. He once told an aspiring young
painter, Louis Le Bail : `Do not define too closely the outlines of things; it is the brushstroke of the right value and color which should produce the drawing. Don't work bit by bit but paint everything at once by placing tones everywhere with brushstrokes of the
right color and value...' His works clearly reflect this aim to blend color and form.
One of Pissarro's important pieces is 'The Pont Neuf: A Winter Morning'. He painted it during his latter days and in a way, it's style is a contemporary tribute to that of the original Impressionists. It depicts a winter sunrise as the city is touched by the rays of the emerging sun.
Pissarro was devoted to Impressionism but the influence of external styles with which he experimented is evident even in his Impressionist works. It is difficult to classify his style into any
distinct chronological categories, but furthermore, his style often varies even within the same painting: his brushwork techniques, together with his compositional devices, seldom follow a single formulaic pattern within any given work. A comparison of two paintings as different and as far apart chronologically as Upper Norwood, Crystal Palace London of 1870, and The Siesta, Eragny, done nearly thirty years later, indicates clearly the extent to which these two works radically differ from each other technically, chromatically, and compositionally. More intriguing is that each work in itself displays at least four or five juxtaposed and distinct techniques.
Pissarro once spoke of the distinctions between what he called 'literary painting' and 'a painter's painting'. To
him, the aim of a 'literary painting' was to depict a historical or social motif, to
tell a story and he considered these works to lack a true artistic quality. Louis Welden Hawkins is his example of one such painter.
His works showed a profound visual and artistic mind, the ability to display the poetic beauty of his subject that undoubtedly arose from his passion for art.