Even during his lifetime, Camille Pissarro

(1830-1903) was described as the ‘father of

Impressionism’. He was the only artist to show at
all eight of the Impressionist exhibitions between
1874 and 1886, and was instrumental in their
organisation from the beginning. In his maturity,
he was the most important influence on a number
of younger artists including Paul Cézanne, Paul
Gauguin and Georges Seurat and the Neo-
Impressionists.
From his early years in the Danish West
Indies and Venezuela, Pissarro drew and painted
outdoors. After his move to Paris in 1855 he
studied at the Académie Suisse, where he met
Cézanne and Claude Monet, and informally with
Camille Corot. He had begun to develop his own
style of Impressionism by the late 1860s, but
felt an almost moral obligation to experiment
with new styles all his life. Pissarro’s aim was
always was to record as accurately as possible the
sensation he experienced in front of nature.
Both at Pontoise from 1872 and in the village of
Eragny-sur-Epte, where he settled in 1884, Pissarro
depicted the reality of rural life — peasants engaged
in a multitude of tasks, from sowing and gleaning
to selling their produce in the local markets. For
a brief period Pissarro and his eldest son Lucien
joined the group of younger artists who took up
Seurat’s ‘scientific’ brand of Impressionism, in
contrast to what Camille described as Monet's
‘romantic’ Impressionism. This ‘pointillist’ or ‘dot’
technique relied on contemporary theories of
colour and became known as Neo-Impressionism.
However, he eventually found the method too
laborious and returned to a more recognisably
Impressionist style.
After a life of poverty, Pissarro began in the
1890s to achieve a degree of financial security.
He was able to make expeditions farther afield,
painting the cathedrals and ports of Dieppe,
Rouen and Le Havre, as well as the grand gardens
and boulevards of Paris. His acquisition of a
printing press in 1894 stimulated a remarkable
late production of experimental etchings and
lithographs.
This catalogue, based on the uniquely rich
collection of paintings, drawings and prints
in the Ashmolean Museum, shows Pissarro to
be the most complex and challenging of the
Impressionists.
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 CAMILLE PISSARRO
FATHER OF IMPRESSIONISM

Colin Harrison
Linda Whiteley

—____A______—
ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM
OXFORD
CAMILLE PISSARRO: FATHER OF IMPRESSIONISM Exhibition supported by:
18 February to 12 June 2022 Mr Barrie and Mrs Deedee Wigmore
The Ruth Stanton Foundation
Copyright © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, 2022 The Huo Family Foundation
Linda Whiteley and Colin Harrison have asserted their moral the
rights to be identified as the authors of this work. HUO FAMILY
FOUNDATION
British Library Cataloguing in Publications Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from Sponsored by Stern Pissarro
the British Library STERN PISSARRO GALLERY
ISBN: 978-1-910807-52-1 STERN PISSARRO GALLERY
STERN PISSARR( »G AL LERY

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any storage
The Exhibition Supporters Circle
and retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing
Robert Lehman Foundation
of the publisher.
In memory of Charles Young
Catalogue designed by Stephen Hebron The Patrons of the Ashmolean Museum
Printed and bound in the UK by Gomer Press
Exhibition organised by the Ashmolean Museum Oxford
MIX in collaboration with Kunstmuseum Basel.
Paper from
responsible sources
= FSC® C114687
Lender acknowledgements
We thank all the lenders who have generously supported
Frontispiece: detail of cat. 60
our exhibition with paintings and drawings from their
For further details of Ashmolean titles please visit: collection, especially Christophe Duvivier from the
www.ashmolean.org/shop Musée Camille Pissarro in Pontoise, and the Pissarro and
Paul Signac families.
ASHMOLEAN NIVERSITY OF
MUSEUM Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau
4 OXFORD OXFORD
Musée Faure, Aix-les-Bains
Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Remagen
Fondation Beyeler, Basel
Kunstmuseum, Basel
Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery
British Museum, London
Dallas Museum of Art, Texas
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Musée Camille Pissarro, Musées de Pontoise
Museum of Modern Art, New York
National Gallery, London
Sheffield Museums
Princeton University Art Museum
Southampton City Art Gallery
Tate, London
And the many private collectors who prefer
to remain anonymous
Contents

Foreword

Pissarro’s Impressionism 11

Linda Whiteley

CATALOGUE
Before Impressionism 41
Impressionism 57
Creative Collaborations 147
Neo-Impressionism 171
Last Years 215

Selected Reading 255

Image Credits 256
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Foreword
Thanks to the generosity of Esther Pissarro, widow of Camille’s eldest son
Lucien, and that of their daughter Orovida, the Ashmolean is the home of
the Pissarro family archive. Within our collection are over fifty paintings by
various members of the Pissarro family, countless letters including over 850
from Camille and about 400 drawings by Camille spanning his career, from
cursory sketches to fully worked-up pastels. There is no better place to study
the artist and so it is a huge pleasure to host this major exhibition, which con-
siders the ways in which Camille Pissarro shaped and responded to the work of
his contemporaries and his galvanising role as the ‘Father of Impressionism’.
Camille was central to the Impressionist movement and famously the only
artist to show at all eight Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886. The
oldest of the group and often described as a father figure by his younger con-
temporaries, he was clearly a natural teacher and valued encourager of others.
And yet he was also a natural pupil, open to learning from those around him,
eager to experiment and thriving off collaboration. This exhibition seeks to
draw out this open-minded and open-hearted aspect of Camille’s career and
personality, through considering the artistic relationships he forged through-
out his life. Whether painting alongside Cezanne, printmaking with Degas or
experimenting with neo-Impressionism techniques with a younger generation,
one can sense and see the way in which Camille emboldened those around him
and was himself emboldened by the push and pull of creative influence and the
licence to experiment. It is in this context, no surprise that Camille also encour-
aged and taught all his children, most notably Lucien, to pursue artistic careers.
This exhibition is a collaboration with the Kunstmuseum Basel and my
thanks go to Josef Helfenstein and Olga Osadtschy for their partnership and
support and to Christophe Duvivier, director of the Musée Camille Pissarro,
who curated the exhibition as it appeared in Basel (as Camille Pissarro: The
Studio ofModernism) and whose work and scholarship underpins this show. The
Ashmolean’s exhibition is an edited version of the Basel show, selected to fit our
galleries by Colin Harrison who was supported in the writing of this catalogue
by Linda Whiteley. We have also benefited from the support and collaboration
of the extended Pissarro family, especially Lionel and Sandrine Pissarro and
David and Lelia Stern to whom I extend heartfelt thanks as I do to the many
lenders to the exhibition.
No major loan exhibition would be possible without financial support and,
as ever, we are grateful to those whose generosity has allowed us to realise this
exhibition. In particular, my thanks go to Barrie and Deedee Wigmore for their
support of our exhibition programme and to Stern Pissarro Gallery for their
sponsorship of the show. Thanks are also due to the Ruth Stanton Foundation,
the Huo Family Foundation, the Robert Lehman Foundation, the Patrons of the
Ashmolean and the late Charles Young for their support.

Alexander Sturgis
Director, Ashmolean Museum

Opposite: detail of cat. 71

Fig.1 Claude Monet (1840-1926), Femmes au Jardin (Wi omen
in the Garden), c.1866. Oil on canvas. Musée d'Orsay,
Paris.
Pissarro’s Impressionism
Linda Whiteley

Yesterday evening I received your letter and also the very beautiful
engraving for L’Image; it is truly superb and truly ours. It makes me
think of the things we once tried to do, Monet in his large canvases
and | myself in the big picture I was working on in 1868-69.

Writing in 1896 to his son Lucien, by then settled in London, Pissarro was
recalling the earliest years of what became known as Impressionism. It was
then, as it was always to be for him, a ‘new’ painting, dedicated to naturalism,
working from nature and, as a matter of principle, contemporary. Technique
was no more than the means to capture, to retain and then to render the art-
ist’s own ‘sensation’: that is, the first; immediate perception of the subject.
In 1866, the year in which his Woman in a Green Dress (Bremen, Kunsthalle)
was well received at the Paris Salon (an important venue for artists to achieve
recognition), Claude Monet was working on what he intended to be his next
Salon picture. He dug a trench in his garden at Ville d’Avray so that he could
reach the upper part of his picture and began painting, in bright sunlight out-
doors, the second of the ‘large canvases’ mentioned by Pissarro, his Women
in the Garden (fig. 1). The first was Monet’s own pictorial response to Edouard
Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, fragments of which survive in the Musée d’Orsay,
Paris. The ‘naturalism’ of Monet’s picture was at the opposite pole from
photography. He made no attempt at illusion with conventional modelling
and perspective. This is a picture visibly made with a brush and with paint —a
re-creation, not an imitation. The jury rejected it.
Women in the Garden is not a painting Pissarro could ever have painted. Nor
would he have thought of such a subject at that date, or even later, in quite
those terms. However, whatever their exact meaning, Pissarro’s words ‘the
things we once tried to do’ make it clear that he recognised a common project,
and one which was to endure. To return to the letter of 1896, and the ‘beauti-
ful engraving’ Lucien had sent him, ‘truly ours’ denotes all that Pissarro later
continued to foster within the artistic practices of his own family: the patient
development of individual vision within a collective project. The working
lives of his children remained a lifelong concern, integral to his own.
For the next ten years Pissarro worked, successively, close to one after
another of what was already recognised as a group of painters with acommon
interest in the art of Manet. In 1866 he moved out ofParis to the small town of
Pontoise, far enough away from the capital to have retained its own character.
Some time later he settled at Louveciennes, still with a rural character, but at
the edge of Paris and close to Monet and Pierre-August Renoir; both men were
painting at Bougival, then a popular boating resort on the Seine. During the
Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, when Pissarro and Monet were in London, they
were taken up by the Paris dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. The future Impressionists
were to be linked with Durand-Ruel for the rest of their working lives.
For almost a year, from the end of 1872, Pissarro worked with Paul Cézanne
at Pontoise. The artists were together again at intervals during the 1870s and
again in the early 1880s. Cézanne later said that he first learned to work reg-
ularly during that first year with Pissarro. His transformation was dramatic.
Towards the end of the 1870s Pissarro collaborated with Edgar Degas on
making experimental prints, then, with Degas’s powerful example, he further
developed his own interest in the potential of figure painting. At this period
Pissarro was encouraging Paul Gauguin, then at the beginning of his career,
and, from 1885, engaging with interest and admiration with a group of younger
artists, with Georges Seurat at their centre. All these artists, as well as Renoir
and others, took part at different times in the ‘Impressionist’ exhibitions of the
later 1870s and the 1880s. Pissarro, who tried hard to keep the group united,
took part in all eight exhibitions and was the principle co-ordinator. Cézanne
later called him ‘the father of us all’.
The Pissarro family, Sephardic Jews who originally settled in Portugal,
had been established in France since the eighteenth century. In 1824 Camille
Pissarro’s father had travelled on business to the Danish colony of St Thomas
in the Caribbean. Camille was born there in 1830. At the age of twelve he left
the island to attend a school in Paris, where his talent for drawing received
sympathetic teaching and he was encouraged to visit museums. Five years
later, his school days over, Camille returned to St Thomas; here he was put to
work with his older brother in the family business. It must have been a dismal
change from his Paris life.
However, he continued to draw enthusiastically, both figures and land-
scapes. One drawing shows nothing more than an unremarkable street cor-
ner at the edge of a town, with a wall and a few trees, yet Pissarro’s interest in
such a motif is already evident (figs. 2 and 3). A meeting with Fritz Melbye, the
itinerant young Danish landscape painter, led eventually to the two men trav-
elling together to Venezuela. There Melbye became a central figure in a little
group of artists working in Caracas. The pattern of Pissarro’s future working
life emerged at this time, much of it revealed in his drawings (many of them
now in the Ashmolean), landscapes and figure studies, often women, engaged
in everyday tasks. Two years later he was back working for his father again, but
his own certainty of what he wanted to do must have persuaded his reluctant
parents to allow him to return to Paris to continue to study art.
Pissarro arrived in November 1855, just in time for the last days of the
Exposition Universelle. He was never to forget the revelation of discover-
ing there the modern French school of landscape, above all the paintings of
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (fig. 4). Forty years later, he recalled the essential
character of Corot’s work:

12 PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM
 Bee

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eee ee
PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM 13
-
 Fig. 4 Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
(1796-1875), La Charrette, Souvenir
de Marcoussis, 1855. Oil on canvas.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Two little willows, a little stream, a bridge, like the picture at the
Exposition Universelle ... What a masterpiece! Happy are those who
see beauty in modest places where others see nothing. Everything is
beautiful, the whole secret lies in knowing how to interpret. (letter to
Lucien, 26 July 1893)

Walter Pater must have been thinking about contemporary French landscape
when in 1877 he wrote:

Then we might say that this particular effect of light, this sudden
inweaving of gold thread through the texture of the haystack, and the
poplars, and the grass, give the scene artistic qualities, that it is like a
picture. And such tricks of circumstance are commonest in landscape
which has little salient character of its own; because in such scenery
all the material details are so easily absorbed by that informing
expression of passing light.

By the time of the Exposition Universelle, French landscape painting had

already moved in the direction of scenes with ‘little salient character’. This
was a significant shift away from works with historical and literary associa-
tions, ultimately derived from pictures by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin
and traditionally prepared by an extended stay in Italy. The most prominent
landscape artists of the mid-century — Théodore Rousseau, Charles-Francois
Daubigny, Jean-Francois Millet and Gustave Courbet — had remained in
France, the forest of Fontainebleau and the countryside within easy reach of

14. PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM

Paris for a time a focus of their work. In their early years Monet, Alfred Sisley
and Renoir painted there too, developing their early landscape style (fig. 5); a
tree study by Pissarro also confirms his interest in the area (fig. 6)
Corot, whose work had made a lasting impression on Pissarro in 185s,
combined both aspects of the French practice. He had been brought up in the
earlier tradition and spent time in Italy, and the practice of making preparatory

Fig. 5 (cat. 7) Alfred Sisley (1939-

99), Avenue ofChestnut Trees near La
Celle-St-Cloud, 1867. Oil on canvas.
Southampton City Art Gallery.

Fig. 6 Camille Pissarro (1830—

1903), Chailly, c.1857. Charcoal on
beige paper. Ashmolean Museum,
WA1952.6.81.

PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM 15
 Left:
Fig.7 Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
(1796-1875), Le Petit Chaville, c.1824.
Oil on paper laid on canvas.
Ashmolean Museum WA1940.1.24.

Below:
Fig. 8 Camille Pissarro (1830-1903),
Entrance to the Village ofVoisins, 1872.
Oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

16 PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM
drawings and oil studies from nature, current since the late eighteenth cen-
tury, retained a powerful hold on him. Corot’s Le Petit Chaville of c.1824 (fig. 7),
painted on paper outdoors near his home at Ville d’Avray, is a study of this
kind. During their early years, as is often pointed out, the Impressionists tried
to eliminate the formal difference between a study and a final composition.
In Le Petit Chaville the ambient light, possibly of late afternoon, the restricted
range of colour, the cast shadows forming horizontal bands across the rise
of the road, turning as it leads out of the picture, the relation of the shapes of
the houses, placed like blocks in relation to one another, the painted closeness
of a poplar tree to the side of the end house, all combine to make the scene
sufficient in itself to modern eyes. These elements were all to find an echo in
Pissarro’s pictures of the later 1860s and early 1870s (fig. 8), although, as Corot
remarked, he saw landscape in grey and blond, Pissarro in green. Later still
such elements saw a response in what Cézanne was able to find for himself
while working with Pissarro.
For much of the nineteenth century in France, the official Salon was where
an artist could make a reputation, hoping for sales and commissions. Pissarro
first exhibited there in 1859, the year in which Charles Baudelaire complained
of the number of landscape artists who ‘mistake a study for a finished com-
position’. Pissarro’s picture was a view of Montmorency (Paris, Musée d’Or-
say), then a small town on the River Oise. It was one of several such country
towns where he stayed, most often with friends, finding subjects to paint
within reach of Paris. At this time Pissarro was sharing a studio with Anton
Melbye, the brother and teacher of his friend Fritz and, like him, brought up
in the Danish plein-air tradition. For the Salon catalogue in 1859 Pissarro listed
himself as a pupil of Anton Melbye; in later catalogue entries he described
himself as a pupil of both Melbye and Corot. Eventually he dropped any
mention of a teacher. He also had some formal training in the studio of Henri
Lehmann, a pupil of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres anda fine draughtsman,
but this did not last long. Pissarro was wary of any kind of ‘style’ acquired in a
teaching studio (as he was to be, years later, for Lucien), and preferred to spend
time in the so-called Académie Suisse in Paris, a ‘free’ studio, without formal
tuition, where he first met Cézanne. Drawing was a natural habit for Pissarro,
but he preferred to learn to draw by observation and practice rather than by
instruction. Hans Holbein and Degas were artists he revered.
Among the generation of landscape painters associated with Fontainebleau,
Daubigny is often mentioned as a model for Pissarro’s river scenes of the early
1860s (figs. 9 and 10). The pictures he sent to the Salon were indeed of scenes
lacking in any salient character, leaving the artist free, as Pater later observed,
to study effects of light and the sky reflected in water. In order to do this
directly from nature, Daubigny had constructed a floating studio. His work,
particularly the theme of a river flowing through a landscape, was certainly
a source of interest to Pissarro. After moving to Pontoise in 1866, however,
he turned to compositions which owe more to the example of Courbet and
above all Corot.

PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM 17
 Nh ein MB. ee ee
4n

Fig.10 Charles-Frangois Daubigny (1817-78), A View ofHerblay, 1869.

Oil on panel. National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

18 PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM
 Fig. 11 Camille Pissarro
(1830-1903), Cote du Jallais, Pontoise,
1867. Oil on canvas. Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York.

He painted his Céte du Jallais, Pontoise in 1867 (fig. 11), the year in which
the Salon jury had refused Monet’s Women in a Garden. Pissarro’s landscape
appeared at the Salon of 1868, when Emile Zola, Cézanne’s boyhood friend
and part of the group around Manet, wrote:

This is the modern countryside. We feel that man has been here,
digging the earth, and dividing it, touching the horizon with sadness.
This valley, this hill have a heroic simplicity and candour. Nothing
would be more banal were it not so grand. From ordinary reality the
painter’s temperament has drawn a rare poem of life and strength.

Zola’s mention of the modern character of the country scene underlines

something which for Pissarro was a necessity. And yet the ‘heroic simplicity’
of the whole composition could also bring to mind certain solemn paint-
ings by Poussin. The banality and grandeur Zola found in the picture match
Cézanne’s much later description of Pissarro as ‘humble and colossal’.
The painting was one in a series of views of a hilly part of Pontoise known
as l'Hermitage. In one, the winding path takes precedence; in another, houses
are the central focus, with kitchen gardens in the foreground, but all have
a striking solidity of structure. Cézanne took up the form, with a higher
horizon, in later works of his own, and once observed that ‘if Pissarro had
continued to paint as he did in 1870 he would have been greater than all of us’.
Some aspects of Pissarro’s picture anticipate changes soon to come, both in
brushwork and in the use of colour. Though green and brown predominate
here (Pissarro never lost his liking for green), there are modulations within
them, as well as some tiny but arresting touches of clear bright pink tones in

PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM__19
the parasol and reflected on the dress of the woman in white. The diagonal Fig.12 Camille Pissarro
brush strokes in the grasses at the side of the path are small and distinct. Their (1830-1903), Route de Versailles,
pale reddish tone is taken up and gently deepened in the colour of the path at Louwveciennes, Effect ofRain,
1870. Oil on canvas. Sterling
the feet of the carefully placed figures, acting as understated complementary
and Francine Clark Art
colours to the pervading green tones. Institute, Williamstown,
The pictures that Pissarro painted while he was living at Tonvecieane Massachusetts.
in 1869-70 continue the understated use of such hues and the visible brush
strokes, but with a marked overall lightening of the scene, an interest in effects
of weather (fig. 12) and the appearance of a rapid manner soon to be generally
talked of as ‘Impressionist’. At the same time he began to explore a new motif,
a straight, tree-lined road leading out of the picture (fig. 13). Monet may have
stayed with him for a time, or perhaps simply came over to Louveciennes from
nearby Bougival to paint several similar scenes, as he later did at Argenteuil
(fig. 14). In London from December 1870, Pissarro soon took up this quiet
theme again, in subjects close to hand (figs. 15 and 16). Monet, meanwhile,
more often painted parks and, most strikingly, the Thames at Westminster.
Pissarro had eventually settled in the suburb of Upper Norwood, not far
from the Crystal Palace, which appears in several of his paintings from that
period (fig. 15). Ina letter to his friend, the painter Wynford Dewhurst, he wrote
that he was in ‘Lower Norwood, at that time a charming suburb ... studying the

20 PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM
 A rik a eee PR a eee |

Fig. 13 Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), Corner ofthe Route de Versailles and the Chemin de l’Aqueduc,
Lowveciennes, c.1869. Oil on canvas. Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore.

Fig. 14 (cat. 62) Claude Monet (1840-1926), Le Boulevard de Pontoise at Argenteuil, 1875. Oil on canvas.
Kunstmuseum, Basel.

PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM 21
 Fig. 15 Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), The Crystal Palace, London, 1871. Oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago.

Fig.16 Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), Fox Hill, Upper Norwood,

1871. Oil on canvas. National Gallery, London.

22 PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM
 > SEE

effects of mist, snow and springtime’ (fig. 16) Some of his family lived in Lower Fig.17 Camille Pissarro (1830-
Norwood, so he may have made a short stay there. Durand-Ruel, already 1903), The Avenue, Sydenham,
familiar with Monet’s work, took a delighted interest in the paintings Pissarro 1871. Oil on canvas. National
Gallery, London.
showed him. The first one he bought was The Avenue, Sydenham (fig. 17). E.H.
Gombrich, discussing the Impressionists in an interview, commented: ‘If you
ask me what the world looks like to me, it looks like a painting by Pissarro’. He
could have been thinking of the London pictures.
Pissarro, his wife and their two children returned to Louveciennes toward
the end of June 1871 and the following year went back to Pontoise. Like John
Constable, whom he admired, Pissarro had a strong (though very different)
sense of locality. In the last year of his life, he wrote:

A mere nothing is good enough for me. If I followed my own wishes

I would stay in just one town, I would finish by finding effects in the
one place.

The little market town of Pontoise and its inhabitants offered a microcosm
of a congenial and recognisable world. In a letter to his friend John Fisher,
Constable had described how ‘the sound of water escaping from mill-dams,
etc., willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts and brickwork ... made me a
painter’. For Pissarro, ‘the wood of old fences, modest houses built of soft
stone called “moellon” [rubble stone], stippled with black smoke, white from

PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM 23
the droppings of pigeons, and touched with the green of moss; linen hung out Fig.18 Camille Pissarro (1830—
to dry by countrywomen in faded blue cotton dresses’, were part of a land- 1903), View ofPontoise, 1873. Oil on
canvas. Private collection.
scape which was to provide, with changes, one enduring subject of his art. It
was as if he had always known it.
At Pontoise Pissarro continued in the same vein of unemphatic natural-
ism as the London pictures, with an increasing interest in unifying the whole.
This is clearly evident in his View of Pontoise, with its roofs huddled beneath
the church and the muted complementary colours, blue and a pinkish russet,
summarised in the stronger hues of the foremost figure’s dress (fig. 18).
Pontoise also offered more purely rural subjects. The Landscape near Pontoise
(fig. 19) is, typically, a working landscape, as Pissarro, like Constable, always
saw the countryside in that way. Years later, in an interview, Pissarro was to
formulate something that he often wrote to Lucien and that may seem a sur-
prising statement for an Impressionist:

The real work for the painter is not in the open air, but later, in the studio,
where first impressions can fuse to render the ‘true poem of nature’.

This picture has nothing of the sense of fleeting time captured at one moment,
unlike contemporary scenes by Renoir and Monet. As Richard Brettell has
written of another painting from this period, it is the ‘slow, recurrent time of
la France profonde’.

24 PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM
 It was at Pissarro’s suggestion that Cézanne, his wife Hortense and their
baby son Paul left Paris and went to live at Pontoise in December 1872. Shortly
afterwards the family moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, near the eccentric Dr Paul
Gachet, already a friend of both artists. Pissarro and Cézanne enjoyed using
Dr Gachet’s own press for a series of prints. This was also the year in which
the two artists worked most closely together. They sometimes painted side by
side, Auvers being close enough to Pontoise for the two men to walk from one
to the other. Early in 1873, Cézanne painted the so-called Maison du Pendu (fig.
20) at Auvers. The roofs, the crumbling walls, the path, the overall tonality
suggest, with a difference, an immediate response to Pissarro, one to which
he in turn responded during that decade. An element of this response appears
in Pissarro’s Portrait of Cézanne of 1874 (fig. 21). A painted landscape of his own
hangs on the wall to the right, the collapsing of space in the portrait enabling
Fig. 19 (cat.10) Camille Pissarro
Cézanne’s sleeve to touch it. (1830-1903), Landscape near Pontoise,
The motif, simply a tree against a house, one which might first have struck —_4g7. Oil on canvas. Ashmolean
Pissarro in a painting by Corot, had an extraordinary potency for Cézanne. His | Museum, wa1940.40.1.

PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM 25
 Fig.20 Paul Cézanne (1839-1906),
La Maison du Pendu, Auvers-sur-Oise, 1873.
Oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Fig. 21 (cat.14) Camille Pissarro

(1830-1903), Portrait ofPaul Cézanne,
1874. Oil on canvas. National Gallery,
London, on loan from the collection
of Laurence Graff OBE.

26 PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM
House ofDr Gachet (fig. 22) takes it up quietly; his House and Tree of 1874 (fig. 23)
transforms it into a wholly new manner of painting. And yet, as Clement
Greenberg wrote: ‘Cézanne himself had belonged to, and with, Impressionism
as he had to nothing else’.
The first Impressionist exhibition took place that same year. Pissarro had
helped to draw up the charter for the Society, characteristically basing it on
one devised for the bakers’ union at Pontoise. The group called itself the Société
anonyme des artistes, peintres, sculpteurs é graveurs, etc., and included a number of
artists never thought of as Impressionists. The title makes use of the usual
term ‘société anonyme’ for a limited company — and so it was, until wound up
at the end of 1874. For Pissarro, all that mattered was their independence; for
Degas, it may have been their respectability.
Count Doria, an early Impressionist collector, bought the Maison du Pendu.
The exhibition received numerous favourable reviews, including one from the Below left:
Fig. 22 (cat. 66) Paul Cézanne
influential Jules Castagnary, though he deplored Pissarro’s liking for ‘cabbages
(1839-1906), Dr Gachet’s House
or any other domestic vegetable’. The adverse criticism was at times intemper- at Auvers-sur-Oise, 1872. Oil
ate, but this, usually satirical, had long been a vein in French Salon reviews. on canvas. Rudolf Staechelin
One admiring critic singled out Monet, Sisley and Pissarro as painting in a Collection, on long-term loan at
new manner, and considered that Pissarro was the inventor of it. Monet’s Fondation Beyer, Riehen/Basel.
Impression, Sunrise, with its faint echoes of Whistler, became the object of Below right:
another critic’s sarcastic play-on-words, but the name ‘Impressionist’ suited Fig. 23 Paul Cézanne (1839-1906),
them well enough. It became what the artists called themselves, though in House and Tree, 1874. Oil on
subsequent exhibitions — except the seventh, where they described themselves canvas. Los Angeles County
as Indépendants — they dropped any suggestion of a society. Museum of Art.

PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM 27
 Looking at Manet’s polished portrait of the writer
and collector Théodore Duret (fig. 24), he might
appear an unlikely friend for the countrified Pissarro,
but he proved a loyal and supportive one. He wrote
to Pissarro at the end of 1873, and again two months
later, urging him not to exhibit in a group exhibition
but at the Salon (something Pissarro had already
decided never to do again) and to concentrate on what
he thought suited Pissarro best, ‘the agricultural land-
scape, rustic scenes with animals’. This advice went in
no way against the grain and Pissarro took it up.
Since the mid-1860s Pissarro and his family had
been in the habit of spending time with his painter
friend Ludovic Piette at his farmhouse in Brittany. He
returned in the autumn of 1874 and painted the Farm
at Montfoucault in Snow (fig. 25) late in the year. He may
have taken it up again two years later, however, when
he dated the work. The resonant blue of the man’s
coat, offset by the yellow hay, their complementary
hues fusing in the pale green gate, are faintly recalled
in the pale overall harmony of the scene. The sheep at
his heels, the waiting white horse (the working horse
that Pissarro so often chose to include) suggest some-
thing like a narrative, unusual in Pissarro’s work. The central focus of the little Fig. 24 Edouard Manet (1832-83),
group anchors the scene, but any rigid symmetry is offset by the slightly tilted Portrait ofThéodore Duret, 1868. Oil

angle of the farm buildings in the background, with the whole composition on canvas. Petit Palais, Paris.

not quite conforming to the shape of a frame. Overall, Farm at Montfoucault has
a note of rustic poetry, matched by a robust use of paint.
The whole is perhaps the closest in subject that Pissarro was to come
to Millet, with whom he was often compared. Millet died in 1875, the time
when Pissarro was working on this picture, and in Pissarro’s view the artist
had already become the subject of a misplaced sentimental admiration. ‘Just
a bit too biblical’ is one of the phrases Pissarro used. In the same letter to
Lucien, written twelve years after Millet’s death, he qualified this comment:
‘this peasant of genius who had expressed the sadness of the peasant’ in fact
revealed himself as one of those who, ‘unconscious of the march of modern
ideas defend the idea without knowing it, despite themselves’. Millet’s central
subject was, with some modifications, Pissarro’s own: the peasant in a work-
ing landscape.
It might be added that Millet’s powerful drawings, which Pissarro came
to prefer to his paintings, were greatly admired by Degas, Pierre Puvis de
Chavannes and Seurat —all artists who in one way or another were to be impor-
tant for Pissarro. Furthermore, in his own later figure subjects, it is possible at
times to find clear echoes of certain of Millet’s distinctive repertoire of poses.
For the next few years Pissarro continued to work with Cézanne, though
more intermittently. In those years, significantly, he varied his manner of

28 PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM
painting according to the subject. By the end of that decade Pissarro had begun
to work with Degas, whom he particularly admired, on prints for a planned
publication, Le Jour et La Nuit. Graphic techniques of various kinds — but espe-
cially aquatint, with its frequent use of a speckled ground — were to influence
the painting methods he developed at that time.
Leaving Pontoise reluctantly in 1884, the family settled finally in Normandy
in the small village of Eragny-sur-Epte, close to the handsome market town of
Gisors. There the five younger children worked at their drawing, advised and
encouraged with a light touch by their father, though to the despair of their
mother: she had hoped that some, at least, might be trained in more reliable
ways of earning a living. Pissarro, meanwhile, found in the garden, the orchard
and the views beyond an endless source of the ‘ordinary’ scenes he chose to
paint. Later, Eragny lent its name to the private press Lucien and his wife set
Fig. 25 (cat. 71) Camille
up in Epping in 1894. Pissarro occasionally made drawings for the engravings
Pissarro (1830-1903), Farm at
they published. At the same time Eragny came to represent the entire family Montfoucault in Snow, 1874-6. Oil
practice, the ‘truly ours’, as Pissarro put it in his letter to Lucien in 1896, when on canvas. Ashmolean Museum,
recalling Monet’s Women in a Garden. WA1951.225.2.

PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM 29
 It was through Lucien that Pissarro first made contact with the young Above left:
group of artists who came to be known as the Neo-Impressionists. All were Fig. 26 (cat. 93) Georges Seurat
(1859-91), The Miller, c.1882. Black
practitioners of the ‘dot’ technique, or pointillism. The method derived from
conté crayon. Trustees of the
current theories of complementary colour, but it is possible that it also owed
British Museum, London.
something to the effects Seurat had produced in his conté crayon drawings on
textured paper (figs. 26-7) (as Millet had done, much earlier), where the white Above right:
of the paper can remain visible as the crayon travels over the low relief of the Fig. 27 (cat. 94) Georges Seurat
(1859-91), A Man Gleaning c.1883.
surface. Seurat said he had himself come to the technique in part through
Black conté crayon over touches
studying Pissarro’s own developing practice of breaking down colour into of graphite. Trustees of the British
separate components, something Pissarro had been doing for years. By the Museum, London.
early 1880s, however, particularly in his work in gouache, he began to use
a graphic technique of regular hatching strokes. Pissarro was to refer to the
work of this younger generation as ‘scientific’ Impressionism, as opposed to
the ‘romantic’ Impressionism of Monet and Renoir. ‘Romantic’, along with
Millet’s ‘sentimentalism’, were both tendencies Pissarro strove to exclude
from his own pictures, though his subjects might often have run the risk of
falling victim to them.
He worked for some time in his own version of a pointillist method — partly
in pursuit of the quality of light he always wanted to achieve and also in search
of the ‘unity’ he was constantly at pains to establish within each picture.
Eventually he found the technique at odds with his need to respond to and
capture the look of nature, the ‘nature of nature’, as he called it. For Pissarro,

30 PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM
however, Seurat belonged to Impressionism, which was a pursuit and never to
be defined by technique. ‘Scientific’ could take on a broader meaning than one
defined by a procedure based on colour theory. Constable, among the first of
nineteenth-century artists to make unremarkable agricultural landscapes the
subject of large-scale exhibition pictures (his Hay Wain, then entitled simply
Landscape: Noon, had famously provoked both admiration and alarm at the
Paris Salon of 1824), once suggested that painting might be considered as a
branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures were but the experiments.
Pissarro would have understood.
Seurat’s monumental pointillist canvas, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (fig. 28),
appeared at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886, along with
works by his fellow pointillist Paul Signac. Pissarro had some reservations,
reluctantly expressed to Lucien, about Seurat’s use of the pointillist technique
in the picture, but he never ceased to consider him an Impressionist. In 1886
Durand-Ruel included Seurat’s great Bathers at Asniéres (London, National
Gallery), rejected by the Salon jury in 1884, in his first exhibition in America,
‘Works in oil and pastel by the Impressionists of Paris’. EE aey coorues seuteto’so-oi),
This was the period in which Pissarro most often referred in his letters , Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884-6.
to his deeply-felt anarchist principles. From time to time he quoted Pierre- jl on canvas. Art Institute of
Joseph Proudhon or Pierre Kropotkine, and on more than one occasion he _ Chicago.

PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM 31
 Fig. 29 Camille Pissarro (1830—
1903), La Charrue, 1901. Colour

Saree ec amvecmt naar sera Rea lithograph, printed in brown, red,

Le ager Be se | blue and yellow inks. Trustees
of the British Museum, London
1931,0721.72.

provided an illustration for anarchist publications, notably La Charrue (fig. 29).

His initial attraction to pointillism may have been increased by the fact that
several of the young Neo-Impressionists, including Signac and Maximilien
Luce, were themselves anarchists. By the 1890s a number of writers, among
them Pissarro’s friends Félix Fenéon, Octave Mirbeau and Georges Lecomte,
were committed to its principles. As for Pissarro’s art, his own view was that
to defend anarchism it was sufficient for this to be independent, impregnated
with anarchist ideas and dedicated to the clear-sighted pursuit of his ‘sensa-
tion’. The country, and co-operative agricultural work, were an integral part
of one ideal anarchist society, as must have seemed self-evident to Pissarro.
Large-scale rural figure subjects form a distinctive group in Pissarro’s work
of the 1880s and early 1890s. Almost always women, their poses at times recall
the ballet dancers of Degas. Dressed in the blue of working clothes, they yet
have little or nothing of any current depictions of countrywomen in their
appearance — nor, as Pissarro seems to say, in the conversations in which they
are often engaged. These women are far from the world of Millet, or from the
semi-Arcadian world of Pissarro’s later rural subjects, yet they belong where
they are in a way that appears to hold a particular meaning (figs. 30-1).

32 PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM
Left:
Fig. 30 Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), Peasant Girl
with a Stick, 1881. Oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay,
Paris.

Below:
Fig. 31 Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), Peasant
Women Grazing Cows, Pontoise, 1882. Oil on canvas.
National Gallery of Art, Washington.

PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM 33
 ee AS

Collectors and dealers wanted variety — not in style but in subject matter. Fig. 32 (cat. 119) Camille Pissarro
Pissarro, when he could afford it, thus spent extended periods away from (1830-1903), The Tuileries Gardens
in the Rain, 1899. Oil on canvas.
Eragny, painting at Le Havre, Dieppe or Rouen. At Durand-Ruel’s suggestion,
Ashmolean Museum, WA1937.73.
he even travelled once to Holland, where the museums interested him as much
as the landscapes. His response to the works of the great seventeenth-century
painters is revealing:

Weare ... right to seek where they did not, or rather to feel differently
... Since we are different, and their works are so clearly of their time
that it would be absurd to follow them.... But how can I describe
Rembrandt’s portraits to you? The paintings by Hals and the
View ofDelft by Vermeer are masterpieces akin to the work of the
Impressionists. I returned from Holland more persuaded than ever to
love Monet, Degas, Renoir, Sisley.

This comment was made at the end of 1898, and Pissarro was about to return
to Paris to make a new series of paintings: the gardens of the Tuileries, seen
from his hotel window in the rue de Rivoli. ‘I have fourteen canvases on the
easel, of which twelve are finished,’ he declared (fig. 32). A year earlier, when

34. PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM

 ‘
’

&

. . ‘4 _

ee i Es =
 Fig. 33 Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), Place du Théatre Francais and Avenue de l’Opéra, Effect ofRain,
1898. Oil on canvas. Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Fig.34 Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), Sunset at Eragny, Autumn, 1902. Oil on canvas. Ashmolea
n
Museum, wA1950.186.

36 PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM
staying in the Grand Hotel du Louvre, he had a view along the Avenue de Fig. 35 Camille Pissarro
Opéra, one of Baron Haussmann’s recent constructions (fig. 33). Of this he (1830-1903), The Pont-Royal and
observed: the Pavillon de Flore, Overcast Sky,
1903. Oil on canvas. Petit Palais,
Paris.
It is very beautiful to paint. Perhaps it is not aesthetic, but Iam
delighted to be able to paint these Paris streets that people have come
to call ugly, but which are so silvery, so luminous and vital.

Returning to Eragny at intervals, Pissarro continued to paint from a win-

dow, protecting his eyes from wind and cold (fig. 34). As Claire Durand-Ruel
Snollaerts has pointed out, this meant that season, time of day and weather
had to provide variety, since the view was always the same. The thick paint
and worked surface of his last paintings, whether the final Paris series or the
orchard at Eragny, give a lightly veiled character to the subject —a more visible
presence of a wish Pissarro had once expressed, to see his motif as if through
a mist, so fine as to be transparent (fig. 35).
That transparent mist might stand as a metaphor, denoting the intensely
individual character of the ‘sensation’. The task of the Impressionist painter,
as Pissarro saw it, was not to record on a painted surface the visible world at a
given moment, as is sometimes thought. It was rather, through the function
of memory and its role in the work of the studio, to find a way of giving back
to the seen world its self-possession.

PISSARRO’S IMPRESSIONISM 37
vi
Far at
Be!
DRERs 1

Bete
SCATALOGUE *:
Before Impressionism

Pissarro began his career as an artist in the Danish West Indies and
Venezuela. He drew and painted from nature under the tuition of Fritz
Melbye. He settled in France in 1855 and the same year visited the great
Universal Exhibition in Paris — as well as, no doubt, Gustave Courbet’s
rival one-man show next door. Pissarro later took lessons with
Camille Corot, who encouraged him to continue to paint outdoors.
Among other artists of an earlier generation, he was most indebted
to Charles-Francois Daubigny. In 1860-61 Pissarro studied at the
Académie Suisse. Here he met Claude Monet and later Paul Cézanne
and other artists, and made copies in the Louvre. The men submitted
work to the official Salon run by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, for
which Pissarro had several works accepted. He was unique among the
artists later known as the Impressionists in that he drew constantly
from nature.

Opposite: detail of cat. 4

41
 1
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Self-Portrait with Palette, c.1896
Oil on canvas
53 x 30.5 cm
Dallas Museum of Art, The Wendy and Emery Reves Collection, 1985.R.44

Pissarro shows himself at work, wearing spectacles and a beret. This is one
of two self-portraits painted in the same costume while he was staying in
the Hotel-Restaurant de Rome in the rue Saint Lazare in Paris, between 1 and
19 July 1896. He had been obliged to seek advice from Dr Parenteau about a
recurrence of conjunctivitis and had acquired the pair of spectacles earlier
in the year in Rouen. He wrote to his son Lucien: ‘what bothers me is not
being able to work outdoors, I’m doing some gouaches here, bathers, and
even posing for myself, for lack of a model!’ In January 1899 Lucien wrote
to his father about an exhibition of Rembrandt at the Royal Academy: he
especially admired the self-portraits and had been reminded of his father’s
self-portrait with spectacles. Although the work lacks the intensity of the
final self-portrait of 1903 (cat. 120), it does show Pissarro taking a more
quizzical look at himself.

42
2
CHARLES-FRANGOIS DAUBIGNY (1817-1878)
River Scene with Ducks, 1859
Oil on wood
20.4 x 40cm
Signed and dated Daubigny 1859
National Gallery, London, NG2622

Among the landscape painters of a slightly older generation, including Millet,

Rousseau and others of the so-called Barbizon school, Daubigny’s work was
of special interest for Pissarro in his early years — particularly his river scenes.
Pissarro took up the subject more than once in the mid-1860s, most notably
in his Banks ofthe Marne at Chenneviéres in Edinburgh, shown at the Salon of
1865. Daubigny’s scenes may also have helped to establish a general taste for
riverside subjects. These appeared frequently, though very differently treated,
in works by the young generation of Impressionist painters, notably Monet
and Renoir, though their own interest then lay in depicting the popular
boating resorts beside the Seine, to the west of Paris.
The river shown here is the Oise, near Auvers, where Daubigny had
a house from 1860 and where Cézanne was to settle from 1872. So did
Dr Gachet, who famously became a friend to a number of artists. Pissarro
was by then living less than six miles away, in Pontoise, both he and
Daubigny having chosen to remove themselves and their families from Paris.
This is a scene of quiet contemplation; much of the interest is focused
on the surface of the water itself. It is smoothly painted, with water lilies
lying here and there on the surface, but the depths are also clearly visible.
Variations of touch play their part in the effect, both in the sky and in the
water; these, together with the muted palette — a range of notes of green
and a light earth tint — were to find an echo in some of Pissarro’s early work
at Pontoise. The scene is not altogether deserted, however: women wash
clothes on the distant shore, while half-concealed to the right lies Daubigny’s
floating studio. This ingenious device (later copied by Monet) enabled the
artist to observe the open stretch of the river at length and at leisure.

44
45
3
JEAN-BAPTISTE-CAMILLE COROT (1796-1875)
The Duck Pond, c.1855—60
Oil on paper, laid down on canvas
24.6 x 39.7cm
Signed COROT
Kunstmuseum Basel, Vermachtnis Dr. Carl Mettler 1942, Inv. 1864

In 1855, at the very beginning of his life as a painter in Paris, Pissarro was
able to visit the Exposition Universelle just before it closed. He took from
it an impression of a flourishing French school, reaching from Ingres and
Delacroix to Courbet and Corot. Years later he remembered Corot’s work at
that time, admiring his ability to discover beauty in the simplest subjects.
For Corot, painting from nature was a constant practice. This study on
paper was made at Herblay, not far from Argenteuil. It could have supplied
elements for one of Corot’s poetic subjects, those which look a little like the
romantic ballets of the period. Here the ‘effect’ — a word hard to define, but
one that Pissarro himself sometimes used — lies in the balanced grouping
of the trees, the symmetry of their reflection in the water, the silvery-grey
tonality overall and the gently modulated shades of green. The structure,
in horizontal bands from foreground to background, was also adopted
by Pissarro for a time. Early in his professional career he came to consider
himself a pupil of Corot. He sought the artist’s advice on various matters and
was allowed access to Corot’s landscape studies.
This work was not a finished picture of the kind Corot would prepare
for the Salon, though by the mid-century such a distinction was beginning
to disappear. Corot may have added the swiftly painted, half-visible tree in
the left foreground, as if to ‘announce’ the scene, a device both Pissarro and
Cézanne were to use later, each in his own way.

46
47
4
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Study of a Male Nude Posed against a Wall, c.1855
Charcoal with traces of white chalk on blue paper
46.8 x 29.5 cm
Stamped C.P. (L. 613e)
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.56

For about a year after his arrival in Paris, Pissarro was a pupil of Isidore
Dagnan-Bouveret at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He later frequented the
Académie Suisse, where he met Monet in 1859, then Cézanne and Armand
Guillaumin in 1861. At the Académie Suisse Pissarro followed a traditional
artist’s education, drawing from the nude, from écorchés, and making studies
of plaster casts of antique sculptures.
This drawing is one of three in the Ashmolean representing the
same model. He has been told to adopt an unstable pose, as though he
were pushing against the wall, and Pissarro has drawn his outline first,
confidently but with inaccuracies (the foreshortening of the right arm is
clumsy, the right knee and right elbow are pointed and the right foot is
improbably triangular). The shading was added subsequently, with special
care taken over the folds of flesh in the stomach. These nude studies, already
far from the conventional idea of the academic, foreshadow Pissarro’s later
opinions about drawing from the nude.

48
 >
CAMILLE PISSARRO

Nanterre, c.1860

Charcoal and white chalk on grey paper

24.3 x 30.9 cm
Inscribed Nanterre and stamped C.P. (L. 613e)
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.82

Nanterre is a small town about seven miles north-west of Paris, and this
drawing is the only record of Pissarros’s having been there. It probably dates
from the early 1860s, when his style became much more vigorous. The broad
strokes of charcoal and bold hatching are reminiscent of the work of Charles-
Francois Daubigny as well as Théodore Rousseau. The immediacy is conveyed
in part by the sheet’s being filled completely, in part from the composition’s
being introduced by a path leading in from the bottom edge (a device frequently
used by Pissarro at this time), and in part from the strong characterisation of
light and shade and the skilful but sparing use of white chalk.

50
51
 6
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Barges on the Seine, c.1863
Oil on canvas
46 x 72cm
Signed C. Pissarro
Musée Camille Pissarro, Musées de Pontoise, Inv.P.1980.3

After his return to France in 1855, Pissarro retained a studio in Paris. However,
he mostly painted in various parts of the Ile de France, at La Roche-Guyon,
Chailly near the village of Barbizon, Montmorency and La Varenne-Saint
Hilaire, as well as the farmyards of Montmartre and other villages. His early
work was strongly influenced by his study with Corot. Indeed, a number of
paintings repeat some of Corot'’s favourite motifs, such as a path through the
trees. He also followed the example of Daubigny in painting riverside views.
At the Salon of 1864 Pissarro showed a view of the Banks ofthe Marne (Glasgow,
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum) and, in the following year, a magisterial
Banks ofthe Marne at Chenneviéres (Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland;
fig. 9).
This view of Barges on the Seine is much smaller, and was presumably
made for sale rather than exhibition. It exemplifies Pissarro’s interest in the
working landscape, a subject that had not interested Daubigny. Barge traffic
became increasingly important with the construction of the canals in the late
eighteenth century. On the left a man approaches the barge carrying a burden
on his back, while a steamer chugs up the foreground behind some boys
fishing from a raft.

52
53
/
ALFRED SISLEY (1839-1899)
Avenue ofChestnut Trees near La Celle-St-Cloud, 1867
Oil on canvas
95 x122cm
Signed and dated A Sisley 1867
Southampton City Art Gallery, SOTAG: 524

At different times during the 1860s Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Pissarro
painted in the forest of Fontainebleau. Their work has inevitably been
compared with their predecessors there — the generation of ‘Barbizon’
artists — but the differences are clear. In their pictures the density of the
forest is relieved by clearings, or by the sudden long perspective of a broad
path. They present a scene as viewed by Parisians enjoying a day in the
country, not the domain of the woodcutters and faggot-gatherers of Millet’s
Barbizon. Nor do they offer the solitary contemplation of Rousseau’s
intense vision.
While working there, Monet was thinking about the setting for what
was to be an immense canvas of modern life, the Déjeuner sur |'Herbe — his
response to Manet'’s recent picture of the same title, itself a touchstone for
the younger generation. In Sisley’s painting the dappled light on the trees
in the right foreground slightly resembles aspects of one of the surviving
fragments of Monet’s work. Sisley also painted within the forest of
Fontainebleau, but the subject of this picture is another royal forest nearer
to Paris, and by then belonging to the Emperor Napoleon 111. Sisley shared
Pissarro’s admiration for Courbet and his use of thickly-applied pigment
over a dark ground. Here, however, the small touches of thinner paint and
the gentler hues also recall the softer touch of Corot, to which Pissarro too
was responsive. The play of light and the glimpses of sky form the simple
events of this picture; in its free handling, the work retains the character
of a study in oils. Apparently Daubigny, then a member of the jury, argued
successfully for its admission to the Salon of 1868.

54
55
Impressionism

In the late 1860s Pissarro and his friends, especially Monet and
Sisley, began to experiment with a lighter palette and more
radical compositions. They painted together, first in the village of
Louveciennes outside Paris and then, following the Prussian invasion
of France in 1870, in London. On his return to France in June 1871,
Pissarro found that his studio had been ransacked and most of his
work of the previous 20 years destroyed. In the following year he
settled in Pontoise and began to paint intensively in the town and
surrounding countryside. His aim, frequently expressed, was to
record as accurately as possible the sensation he experienced in front
of nature, and he restlessly experimented with different styles to
achieve his aims. He was instrumental in the organisation of the first
Impressionist exhibition in 1874, becoming the only artist to show in
all eight of the group’s exhibitions.
During the 1880s the human figure gradually came to play a more
prominent role in Pissarro’s paintings. Unlike Monet and Renoir, he
did not paint the middle classes at play, but the farmers and shepherds
at work in the fields and orchards or selling their produce in the
local market. After Pissarro’s move from the bustling market town
of Pontoise to the village of Eragny-sur-Epte in 1884, the mood of his
paintings became more pastoral. He frequently painted the views he
could see from his house over the orchard and meadows towards the
neighbouring village of Bazincourt.

Opposite: detail of cat. 55

57
 8
CAMILLE PISSARRO
The Village Screened by Trees, 1869
Oil on canvas
55.2 x 45.4cm
Signed C. Pissarro
Private collection

At the time of this work Pissarro had probably left Pontoise for
Louveciennes. He was again in close contact with Monet, Sisley and Renoir.
The overall lightness of the picture, both in tonality and handling — the
paint seems at times almost translucent — is a different way of painting from
the earlier Pontoise views. Pissarro uses small touches of paint, patches here
and there of brilliant colour, a red roof, or a blue one, while maintaining
overall the simple varients of green and brown of which he was particularly
fond. Like Corot (fig. 4, p. 14), Pissarro always retained a feeling for the lie
of the land, often observed along a road, at right angles or running into the
distance along a diagonal. Also like Corot, he mantained a lasting interest
in the range of effects produced by a screen of trees with houses beyond. A
sense of the houses as dwellings, and the inclusion of figures who belong to
the scene, are deeply rooted aspects of Pissarro’s art.

58
 e
CAMILLE PISSARRO
The Countryside near Louveciennes, Summer, 1870
Oil on canvas
41 x 65cm
Signed and dated C. Pissarro. 1870
Private collection

In 1869 Pissarro moved away from Pontoise to stay at Louveciennes, much

nearer Paris. He probably wanted to be closer to Monet, Sisley and Renoir,
by then ensconced within the little circle of Manet and his followers and
meeting often at the Café Guerbois in the Batignolles area of Paris. Pissarro’s
most familiar work from the Louveciennes period is the series of tree-
lined roads. This classic theme of landscape was also taken up by Monet,
particularly from 1869 to 1870, when he and Pissarro sometimes worked
side by side.
However, Pissarro also sought out the more rural outskirts of the little
town. It is seen here at a distance, the church just visible beyond the trees.
The viewpoint is unexpected, sidelong rather than directly into the picture,
and there is little or nothing in the way of a ‘framing’ device. To the right is
a tree in the position traditionally known as repoussoir, creating an imagined
space between foreground and background in the manner of stage scenery.
Otherwise the view is ‘as seen’, with the range of colour — green, brown and
light earth — brighter than the earlier Pontoise views, but still understated.

60
61
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Landscape near Pontoise, 1872
Oil on canvas
46 x 55cm
Signed and dated C. Pissarro. 1872
Ashmolean Museum, bequeathed by Montague Shearman
through the Contemporary Art Society, 1940, WA1940.4.1

Pissarro’s return to Pontoise after extended stays at Louveciennes and

London reunited him with a familiar landscape of river, town and country.
A certain ordinariness, heightened in this picture by an overall muted
tonality, is tempered by a balance of foreground and answering background
trees, as well as a path in the manner of Corot. This last we seem to be
invited to take, at least as far as the rickety fence.
The foreground is furnished with incident: vegetation described with
visible and varied touches of green, a pale brown and occasional white.
The field beyond, with its yellow tones — touches of paint made more
intense in contrast with the blue of the sky — are more softly fused and the
terrain arranged in horizontal bands. The haycart, almost at the edge of
the picture, like the floating studio in Daubigny’s scene (cat. 2), maybe for a
moment kept in the wings, completes the scene, the movement across the
foreground slow and purposeful.
It is possible to imagine that Degas looked often at this picture, and with
some level of satisfaction. He acquired it from a dealer to whom Pissarro
occasionally sold work, and he kept it for the rest of his life.

62
 SESE a.
|

63
 11
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Bouquet ofPink Peonies, 1873
Oil on canvas
73 x 60cm
Signed and dated C. Pissarro /1873
Ashmolean Museum, presented by Esther Pissarro, 1951, WA1951.225.1

John Rewald, who collaborated with Lucien Pissarro on the first edition of
Camille’s letters to his son, wrote that Julie, Pissarro’s wife, ‘always grew
masses of flowers in her garden; among them her greatest pride were her
pink peonies’. Pissarro painted relatively few still lifes and most of them
were flower pieces. This Bouquet ofPink Peonies, painted at Pontoise in the
early summer of 1873, may have been an especially personal work. The
complicated blooms are described with delight, the brush heavily loaded,
while the leaves and background are more thinly painted. The stoneware
vase is of a kind collected by Dr Gachet. The polished table is likely to have
added to the pleasure Julie Pissarro must have taken in this picture, which
remained in the family collection.

64
 119s
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Quai du Pothuis at Pontoise, 1874
Oil on canvas
34 x 51cm
Signed and dated C. Pissarro Pontoise 1874
Private collection, Switzerland

Pissarro became familiar with the landscape around Pontoise when he lived
there from 1866 to 1868. After his return from London, he settled there in 1872,
remaining until his final move to Eragny in 1884. The town offered a huge
variety of motifs and Pissarro took advantage of all of them: hills, woods, fields,
orchards and kitchen gardens, docks on the river Oise and small factories. It
was often noted that, apart from the small old quarter with its two churches
and old houses, there was nothing conventionally picturesque about Pontoise,
since much of the town had been destroyed in the French Revolution.
The stretch of the bank known as the Quai du Pothuis borders the north bank
of the river and was named after the island in the middle of the stream. Pissarro
painted it many times looking north-east, as here, incorporating the buildings
and chimney of the Chalon factory, or south-west, showing the stone bridge
built in 1841; over it crossed the main road from Paris to Rouen. The factory
had only recently been established: in 1871 J. Chalon and company was granted
permission to build a treacle distillery and a potash factory on the banks of
the Oise at Saint-Ouen-l’‘Aumone, a short distance downstream. Here the trees
and bushes of the Ile de Pothuis almost conceal the prominent chimney, its
presence indicated by the smoke billowing in the breeze on the right.

66
67
 13
CAMILLE PISSARRO
The Quarry, c.1875
Oil on canvas
58 x 72.5 cm
Stamped C.P.
Rudolph Staechelin Collection. On long-term loan at Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel

The contrasting right and left sides of this composition are linked by a
figure whose walk takes her from one to the other. The quarry of the title is
no more than a glowing patch of yellow, spread with a palette knife. Both
Pissarro and Cézanne made use of this long, flexible blade when working
together intermittently during the mid-1870s, but the tool was particularly
associated with Courbet. His work may have been an inspiration for the dark
stream below the bridge that, immediately below the woman with her basket,
creates an additional link between the two sides. The rich, dense foliage of
the trees on the right may also derive from Courbet, but the miniature screen
of trees anticipates later works by Cézanne.

68
14
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Portrait ofPaul Cézanne, 1874
Oil on canvas
73 * 59.7 CM
National Gallery, London, on loan from the collection of Laurence Graff OBE

Pissarro and Cézanne met at the Académie Suisse in 1861 and remained
friends throughout their lives. Indeed in 1906, three years after Pissarro’s
death, Cézanne described himself in the catalogue of an exhibition in Aix-en-
Provence as ‘Paul Cézanne, pupil of Pissarro’. The men were closest between
1870 and 1885, the years in which Pissarro was developing his particular
interpretation of Impressionism.
This portrait was only the second painting that Pissarro made of an
artist (the first was of Ludovic Piette, in 1861, in a private collection). It was
probably painted during the winter of 1874, when Cézanne was living at
Auvers and frequently walked to Pontoise to visit Pissarro. His presence fills
the shallow pictorial space, closed by the wall of Pissarro’s studio, on which
are two caricatures. On the left is an image by André Gill, friend and admirer
of Courbet, from the satirical journal l’Eclipse. It shows Adolphe Thiers,
sometime president of the Republic, grandly acknowledging his achievement
in raising funds to pay the huge reparations demanded by the Prussian
coalition after the defeat of France in 1871. On the right is a print of Courbet,
opponent of all officialdom, published on the occasion of his one-man
exhibition organised in opposition to the Salon in 1867. Appearing to lean
towards Cézanne, Courbet’s outstretched hand may touch onhis importance
in the practice of Cézanne and Pissarro at that time. Below is one of Pissarro’s
own recent paintings, the Rue de Gisors, the House ofPére Gallien, Pontoise, a
composition which must have interested Cézanne.
The portrait follows, with a difference, Edouard Manet’s elegant portrait
of Emile Zola of 1868, in which he places the subject in an interior reflecting
his artistic and intellectual interests (Paris, Musée d’Orsay). In contrast,
although Pissarro’s portrait may suggest, more enigmatically, something of
the same, the image of Cézanne seen at half-length, wearing a thick overcoat,
scarf and winter hat, as if he had just arrived in the studio, speaks above
all of the independent, hard-working practice and mutual regard of these
two painters during the year in which they worked most closely together.
Unfinished and unsigned, the Portrait ofPaul Cézanne remained in Pissarro’s
possession until his death.

fi
Experiments in Print-making with Dr Gachet

In April 1872 the homeopathic doctor Paul The subjects were favourites in other media.
Gachet bought a house in the rue Saint Remy Indeed, The Road to Rouen: the hills at Pontoise
(now the rue du Dr Gachet) at Auvers-sur-Oise. (cat. 17) was inspired by a painting dated 1872
He seems to have intended to found a colony of which remained in the artist’s possession until his
artists and played a role in forming the branch death. In it Pissarro’s wife Julie and their daughter
of Impressionism that Pissarro thought of as the Minette are seen enjoying the panoramic view
school of Pontoise, the other being the school from Pontoise towards the hills of /Hautil. In the
of Argenteuil, where Monet, Renoir and Sisley etching, which is in reverse of the painting, Pissarro
were working. Gachet encouraged three artists has moved the view slightly to the right, so the
— Pissarro in nearby Pontoise, Cézanne, who road to Rouen is not as prominent. The print is a
visited Gachet and rented a house at Auvers in masterpiece of economy, with fields and hills in
the summer of 1873, and Armand Guillaumin — to the distance lightly drawn in parallel strokes, and
take up etching. At this date Gachet did not own a the turned earth in the foreground more densely
printing press, so the small plates were printed by and freely etched. The portrait of Cézanne (cat. 23),
professional printers in Paris. Lifetime impressions which followed the monumental painting executed
are rare. Each artist chose a symbol with which to during the previous winter, deliberately places the
sign his plates: Pissarro a small flower, Guillaumin figure against an unetched background. Again,
a cat, Gachet (who worked under the pseudodym however, Pissarro shows Cézanne in hat and
Van Ryssel) a duck and Cézanne a hanged man, overcoat, his hair and beard exuberantly unkempt.
inspired by the so-called House of the Hanged Man Cézanne made only nine prints during his
in Auvers. career and his five etchings all date from July
Pissarro had made his first etching in about 1873. The portrait of Guillaumin (cat. 20), whose
1863, but his interest in the technique was financial circumstances forced him to work
desultory: only a single impression was taken at nights as a highways administrator, was his
from several of the plates in the 1860s. Under the second plate. The motif at the top left refers to the
stimulus of Dr Gachet and his friends, however, House of the Hanged Man in Auvers, the subject
in the summer of 1873 Pissarro began a sustained of one of Cézanne’s paintings (1873, Paris, Musée
campaign of etching which continued almost d’Orsay). The farmyard (cat. 22) was etched after a
until the end of his life. Indeed, he was the most painting by Cézanne which at the time belonged
prolific printmaker among the Impressionists, in to Pissarro. The vigorous, almost brutal, strokes
both etching and lithography. The etchings made betray Cézanne’s inexperience with the medium.
at Auvers are much more economical in technique The head of the little girl (cat. 21) may be a portrait
than his earlier prints, reflecting Pissarro’s of Gachet’s daughter Clementine Elisa Marguerite,
growing confidence. born on 21 June 1869.

74
15
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Hillside at Pontoise, 1873
Etching on paper
11.9 x 16 cm (plate); 16.0 x 21.4 cm (sheet)
Signed in the plate Pissarro and inscr. in pencil No 1 1er etat / Coteaux a Pontoise /(cuivre)
and signed C. Pissarro
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.500

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 16
CAMILLE PISSARRO
The Oise at Pontoise, 1874
Etching on paper
7.5 x 11.8 cm (plate); 16.1 x 22.1 cm (sheet)
Signed in the plate Pissarro and inscr. in pencil 1e Etat no 5 // 'Oise a Pontoise (Cuivre)
and signed C. Pissarro
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.501

gr € 4 t ; :
f CP PRA Br ? fe ¢ Pee wd BS :b PH

76
 =

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a

CAMILLE PISSARRO
The Road to Rouen: the Hills at Pontoise, 1874
hi paper, printed in dark brown
1x 16 cm (plate);17x 27.3 cm (sheet)
Signed in the plate Pissarro

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 18
ARMAND GUILLAUMIN (1841-1927)
The Sunken Lane at Hautes-Bruyeres, 1873-4
Etching on paper
13 x 9.4 cm (plate)
Musée Camille Pissarro, Musées de Pontoise, Inv. Z.ACP.G.1992.1

78
19
PAUL GACHET (1828-1909)
Floods at Charenton, 1872-5
Etching on paper
16.7 x 10.5 cm (plate)
Musée Camille Pissarro, Musées de Pontoise, Inv. G.1980.6

73
 20
PAUL CEZANNE (1839-1906)
Portrait of Guillaumin with a Hanged Man, 1873
Etching on paper
25 x 18.9 cm
Musée Camille Pissarro, Musées de Pontoise, Inv.1928.65

80
21
PAUL CEZANNE (1839-1906)
Head ofa Young Girl, 1873-4
Etching on paper
13.2 x 10.8 cm (plate)
Musée Camille Pissarro, Musées de Pontoise

81
 Page
PAUL CEZANNE (1839-1906)
Farmyard at Auvers-sur-Oise, 1873-4
Etching on paper
13.5 x 11cm (plate)
Musée Camille Pissarro, Musées de Pontoise, Inv. Z.ACP.G.1986.1

82
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Paul Cézanne, 1874
Etching on laid paper
27 x 21.5 cm (plate); 42.6 x 29 cm (sheet)
Signed and dated in the plate C. Pissarro 1874
Stamped CP and numbered 41/75
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.506

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83
 24
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Jeanne-Rachel Pissarro (Minette) seated at a table, c.1872
Watercolour over black chalk
24.5 x 19.2cm
Signed in ink C. Pissarro
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.97

25
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Half-length Portrait ofLucien Pissarro, c.1874
Watercolour over charcoal on off-white paper
28.3 x 23.5 cm
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.98

Cat. 24

84
Pissarro’s children were frequent subjects. They featured in informal
drawings such as these, in lithographs printed in only a few examples for
members of his family and in more finished works of art (cf. cat. 28). He was
especially fond of Jeanne-Rachel, known as Minette (1865-1874), and painted
three portraits of her (cf. cat. 27). These two watercolours may have been
conceived as a pair, though only that of Minette is signed. She is seen wearing
a cap, seated with her right arm leaning on a table, probably in the dining
room. It was probably made shortly before she fell ill in October 1873; she
died on 6 April 1874. The vigorous pencil drawing defining her costume and
silhouette suggest that Pissarro was not altogether satisfied with the drawing.
By contrast Lucien, shown in front of a dresser with a vase on a shelf, is more
confidently drawn in watercolour over pencil, the roundness of his head
reminiscent of Cézanne’s numerous drawings of his own son, Paul junior.

Cat. 25

85
 26
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Portrait ofLucien Pissarro, 1874

Lithograph on paper
27.8 x 38.1 cm (sheet)
Signed and dated C. Pissarro / 1874
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.653

In addition to his renewed interest in making etchings with Dr Gachet and

others during the winter of 1873-4, Pissarro also made his first lithographs
in 1874. They were all produced as transfer lithographs, the drawing made
with a greasy crayon onto paper that was specially prepared with a soluble
surface layer. The paper was then placed face downwards on the stone and
moistened until the soluble layer dissolved. The most poignant is a lightly
sketched portrait of Pissarro’s dead daughter Jeanne, Dead Child, and the
strongest is this remarkable profile portrait of his son Lucien. Aged 11, he is
shown sitting on a sofa or easy chair and sketching. In spite of its status as a
very private print — very few impressions were printed — Pissarro has, as with
his etched portrait of Cézanne of the same year, carefully signed and dated
the work.

86
nare
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CT issarto
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87
27
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Jeanne Pissarro (known as Minette) Holding a Doll, 1874
Oil on canvas
73 x 60cm
Stamped C.P.
Private collection, on long-term loan to the Ashmolean Museum, L1209.1

Jeanne-Rachel, born in May 1865, was Pissarro’s second surviving child.

Picasso painted and drew her many times before she died, of a prolonged
feverish illness, in April 1874. Another oil painting in the Ashmolean
collection shows her, a little fragile, on a chair in her father’s studio; she is
simply and charmingly dressed in blue and holding a fan. Already her long
hair has been cut in an attempt to lessen the fever, a treatment then thought
to be effective.
By the time of this portrait Jeanne may have been spending most of her
time in the chair in which we see her. Pissarro must have been sitting close
to the child as he worked, and her image is brought almost to the surface of
the picture. Jeanne’s hair is now cropped shorter still, evidence of further
attempts to arrest the progress of her illness.
In the earlier picture, where space surrounded the child, the touch was
light and broken and the palette mainly blue, white and a soft brown. Here a
starker black, white and the red of the warm wrap predominate, in patches
rather than in small touches of colour. It must have been acutely painful to
Pissarro to record his daughter in what would have been the last stages of
her illness. The doll she nurses adds to the pathos, though not in any way
sentimental, of this tender, unflinching image, destined never to be finished.

88
28
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Julie Pissarro Sewing, the ‘Red House’, Pontoise, ¢.1877
Oil on canvas
54x 45cm
Stamped C.P.
Ashmolean Museum, presented by Esther Pissarro, 1951, WA1951.225.3

Julie Vellay (1838-1926), the daughter of land-owning peasants from

Burgundy, joined Pissarro’s parents’ household in 1860 as a cook’s assistant.
Pissarro soon began a relationship with her, resulting in her dismissal. In
1863 she gave birth to the couple’s first child; they did not marry until 1871,
following the death of their third child. In all the couple had eight children,
of whom three died young.
Mme Pissarro’s life was entirely devoted to her family and she frequently
complained of a lack of money. As she wrote to Lucien:

Your poor father is very innocent. He has no idea of the difficulties of

life. He knows, however, that I owe 3,000 francs, and he only sends
me 300. Then he tells me to wait. Always the same thing. I don’t mind
waiting, but you have to eat in the meantime. I have no money at all,
and no-one gives me credit. Imake a little down payment here and
there, but it’s too meagre for anyone to agree to give me credit.

For his part, Pissarro wrote to his friend Eugéne Murer at about this time:

My studies are made with no sequel, no gaiety, no spirit ... my wife

... is so utterly discouraged, even desperate, that caution makes it
essential to go and be with her.

This is the most substantial of a group of portraits of his wife that Pissarro
painted in the house at Pontoise, at 18 (now 36) rue de l'Hermitage, which
they occupied from April 1874 until the summer of 1881. Inexplicably known
by the family as the ‘red house’, it had elaborate ironwork with volutes in
front of the windows. Julie is portrayed absorbed in her sewing, as in a much
earlier portrait. All but one show her caring for her children or occupied in
domestic work. This is the most intimate, the hands unfinished. It was one
of the paintings that Pissarro gave to his wife for her personal collection; she
later gave it to Lucien.

90
 29
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Portrait ofMarie Daudon, 1876
Pastel on rough paper
36.8 x 25.3 cm
Signed and dated C. Pissarro/ 1er Janvier, 1876
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.99

Pissarro’s portraits are few, and mostly confined to the family circle; his
paintings of Piette and Cézanne denote his close relationship with these two
friends. The Portrait ofMarie Daudon was originally designed as one of a pair,
the second depicting the subject’s brother Jules; they were the nephew and
niece of Madame Pissarro. Against the dark ground, the light falls on the
sitter’s face, revealing an attentive look and a faint smile kept in check. The
bold handling and sombre tone, relieved by the brilliant red against the dark
dress, are not typical of the delicacy of pastel. They may rather suggest an
interest in seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish portraiture, or maybe
they reflect the robust character of the sitter.

92
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Portrait ofLucien Pissarro, 1883
Pastel on off-white paper
56 x 38.4 cm
Signed and dated C. Pissarro 83
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.208

Like all Pissarro’s children, Lucien was brought up drawing and painting
with his father. In order to please his mother, he found work in firms in Paris,
but continued to keep up his artistic studies; he is recorded as making copies
after Holbein in the Louvre in 1880. In January 1883 Lucien moved to London
to learn English. He lived with his cousins the Isaacsons in Holloway, and for
a time worked for a firm of music publishers. At the earnest entreaty of his
father, who feared that the cholera epidemic in England would bring in new
quarantine regulations, Lucien returned to spend 1 August to 11 October with
his family at Osny, near Pontoise. This portrait was made during that visit.
Lucien, aged only 20 but already with the beard that he was to wear for
the rest of his life, seems uncomfortable sitting for his father, though the
medium of pastel would have meant that he did not sit for too long. Pissarro
had perhaps been encouraged by Degas in the use of pastel, but he generally
used it for preparatory studies for his paintings, rather than finished works
in their own right. An inscription on the reverse suggests that he may have
intended to make an oil portrait from this pastel, but this was never begun.

94
: f
j

95
 31
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Portrait ofLudovic-Rodolphe Pissarro, c.1883—4
Black crayon on off-white paper
21.1 x 16.7cm
Stamped C.P. (L. 613e)
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.203

Ludovic-Rodolphe (1878-1952), known in the family as Rodo, was the artist’s

fourth son; like his brothers, he studied as an artist with his father. This
technically assured drawing in black crayon was probably made when he
was about four or five, staring rather nervously at his father as he draws
him, slightly turning to his left. The soft, curvilinear lines for the hair are
complemented by the rapid parallel hatching in the background.

96
 s Sat
ee Se
mS ISSN ARPA

97
32
MAXIMILIEN LUCE (1858-1941)
The Pissarro Family, c.1895
Lithograph
39 x 29cm
Musée Camille Pissarro, Musées de Pontoise, Inv. Z ACP G 1981.4

Luce, first trained as a wood engraver, was to become a close friend of the
Pissarro family. In the spring of 1890 he and Lucien travelled to London with
Camille, staying for three weeks while Camille worked on several London
views. In the autumn of that year Lucien returned to settle in the city. His
father’s letters occasionally mention Luce as if speaking of a close mutual
friend. He was one of the small circle of artists and writers that included
Fénéon, Signac and Georges Lecomte, and in 1891 he hoped that Lucien
might collaborate with Camille in outlining for a publication the anarchist
conception of the artist’s role in society. ‘Georges Lecomte will do the
writing,’ the Pissarros were assured.
Their relations were close at a time when Pissarro once again began
making prints, and his sons George and Félix (Titi) were making etchings. By
November 1893 Pissarro was writing to Lucien that ‘Fénéon, Luce and Signac
send you friendly regards’, and in January 1894 he told his son that ‘Georges
and Rodo are here. They went with Luce to pull some lithographs on zinc’.
Pissarro himself, meanwhile, had made ‘a whole series’ of lithographs ‘in
romantic style’.
These exchanges give some idea of the ideas and interests linking Luce
both to the Pissarros and to Eragny, where the artist and his wife came
to stay in the summer of 1895. Lucien also spent that summer at Eragny,
accompanied by his wife and young daughter; during those months
Lucien discussed plans for the Travaux des Champs with his father. Shortly
after Lucien and his family left, Pissarro wrote that the Luces were still
there, adding ‘Luce is beginning some studies, his wife is much less sad’
(the couple had lost a child the previous year). This may have been the
context for Luce’s lithograph. It is a poignant and tender image, suggesting
that he, too, understood something of Pissarro’s thoughts about Eragny,
family and artistic practice. Pissarro and his daughter Jeanne appear twice.
Jeanne (known as Cocotte) is shown reading, while Félix, on the lower left,
is preparing a print; his second son Georges, who followed an artistic path
of his own, wears a hat and appears equally absorbed, and Paul-Emile, the
youngest, is asleep.

98
99
 33
GEORGES MANZANA-PISSARRO (1871-1961)
The Impressionists’ Picnic, ¢.1900
Pen and brown ink on off-white paper
20.5 x 26.2 cm
Inscribed Guillaumin, Pissarro, Gauguin, Cézanne, madame Cézanne le petit Manzana
and signed Manzana-Pissarro
Private collection

From around 1894 Camille’s second son Georges painted and exhibited
under his maternal grandmother’s maiden name of Manzana. This lively
drawing is a humorous reminiscence of his father’s associations with his
younger friends in the late 1870s. While Cézanne (on the right) continues to
work on his landscape, Guillaumin, Pissarro, and Gauguin are enjoying the
picnic prepared by Mme Cézanne. In the background smoke billows from
the chimney of the factory at Pontoise.

100
bores

101
 34
CAMILLE PISSARRO etal.
O

‘Le Guignol’, 1889

Volume
Closed: 33.3 (H) x 25.5 (W) x 4.5 cm
Open: 33.3 (H) x 51 (W) x 4.5 cm
Musée Camille Pissarro, Musées de Pontoise, Inv. L 1998.1

2D)
LUCIEN PISSARRO (1863-1944)
Old French Songs, 1889-90
Volume
24.0 x 18.5 cm
Ashmolean Museum, WA.0A1806

Cat. 34

102
 Pissarro encouraged all five of his sons in their interest in art, and he and Lucien
frequently referred in their correspondence to the ‘school of Eragny’. By 1889,
when these albums were compiled, they had adopted the childish pseudonyms
used in the illustrations in Le Guignol and elsewhere. In descending order of
age, Georges signed himself ‘Jean Lapin’ (or ‘John Rabbit’), Félix was ‘Mistigri’,
Ludovic-Rodo was ‘Piton’ and the youngest, six-year old Paul-Emile, was
‘Lezard’. (Julie Pissarro preferred her daughter Jeanne not to participate in such
artistic enterprises, but to concentrate on domestic tasks.) When Lucien settled
in London in November 1890, Camille kept him up to date with his brothers’
progress, sending him examples of their prints and drawings. Le Guignol includes
work by all five brothers, mostly illustrated stories and poems following Lucien’s
example, but also humorous drawings and some etchings.
The album of Old French Songs was sent to Esther Bensusan in December 1889
in gratitude for her help in trying to sell Lucien’s illustrated stories to publishers
in London. It comprises nine pages decorated by Lucien, five by Ludovic-Rodo,
three by Félix and two by Georges, with a single drawing by Camille.

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Cat. 35

103
 36
LUCIEN PISSARRO (1863-1944)
‘La Marseillaise des Epiciers’, 1889
Volume
24.0 x 18.5 cm
Dedicated A ma cousine Esther C. Isaacson and signed and dated Lucien Pissarro 31 Oct. 1889
Ashmolean Museum, presented by David Bensusan-Butt, 1993, WA1993.327

Between 1884 and 1889 Lucien made a number of watercolour illustrations

for children’s stories, in a style indebted to English artists such as Walter
Crane. He sent several to Esther Bensusan in 1889, among them II était une
bergére, Histoire d’un long nez and Trip to the Apple’s Country. They were aimed
at the English market, and Esther Bensusan and Lucien’s cousin Esther
Isaacson showed them to several publishers. None was interested, owing
to the high cost of making colour reproductions. The Marseilleise des Epiciers
continues in this vein and was made as a gift for Esther Isaacson who, with
the encouragement of Camille, was developing radical political views. The
anarchist poem was written by Lucien’s old friend Auguste Leboeuf, who
was later to marry another of Lucien’s cousins, Eugénie Estruc. Its target
was the reaction from the small shops and supermarkets in Pontoise to
the arrival of a branch of Félix Potin in 1884. Their fear of competition is
mercilessly parodied in this modest but potent symbol of the young author's
insubordination.

104
Experiments in Print-making: Prints by Degas
and Pissarro for Le Jour et La Nuit 1879-80

Pissarro was an assiduous printmaker all his adult life, producing nearly 200
etchings and lithographs. His most important prints were those made in
collaboration with Degas in 1879-80 for the abortive publication Le Jour et La
Nuit. The project was first mentioned in May 1879. At this point its contributors
were to be Degas and his protegée Mary Cassatt and Pissarro, together with Félix
Bracquemond, Gustave Caillebotte and others; Caillebotte was to underwrite
the costs. Although the first issue was announced on 1 February 1880, it was
never published; by the end of the year Pissarro had decided that he had neither
the time nor the money to continue. Only one of Pissarro’s etchings was printed
in a proper commercial edition (cat. 39).
The importance of these two years lay in the extraordinary experiments that
Degas and Pissarro made in etching, drypoint and aquatint. Occasionally they
used more esoteric techniques such as soft ground etching, metal brushes and
so forth. These prints were of unprecedented painterly qualities, going through
many states; they were sometimes printed in different colours, and sometimes
printed by each other.

7
EDGAR DEGAS (1834-1917)
Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Etruscan Gallery, 1879-80
Softground etching, drypoint, etching and aquatint on paper
27 x 23.6 cm
Trustees of the British Museum, 1919,0415.746

Like Pissarro and Mary Cassatt, Degas based his print intended for publication
in Le Jour et La Nuit on an existing work, in this case a pastel. Contemporaries
recognised the figure of Miss Cassatt in the distinctive bearing of the standing
woman leaning on her umbrella; she reappears, alone, in the contemporary
print Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Paintings Gallery. Here Cassatt and her sister
Lydia are shown in the gallery of Etruscan antiquities, studying a sarcophagus.
Once again the plate developed from an etched first state — indicating the poses
and placing of the figures — to a much more descriptive interior, achieved by the
application of at least two tones of aquatint, complemented by small areas of
work in drypoint. Degas has exploited the possibilities of depicting direct and
reflected light throughout the plate, as well as the very varied textures of both
clothes and objects.

106
=
el
ESS
 38
EDGAR DEGAS (1834-1917)
The Little Dressing Room, 1879-80
Drypoint on paper
12 x 7.9 cm (plate)
Trustees of the British Museum, London,
bequeathed by Campbell Dodgson, 1949, 1949,0411.2420

Degas’s drypoint was made on a plate previously used to print a single

impression of a theatrical scene. Together with the contemporary and
much more ambitious Leaving the Bath, these were the first prints to depict
one of Degas’s favourite subjects. The Little Dressing Room progressed
through five states, gradually transforming the lightly sketched figure of a
nude washing at a basin into a fully elaborated illustration of a prostitute in
an opulent interior. Only eleven impressions of the print are known. This
impression of the final state was given by Degas to Pissarro, presumably
when they were collaborating most closely on Le Jour et La Nuit.

108
= = Sor es as E

109
 as.
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Wooded Landscape at |’ Hermitage, Pontoise, 1879
Softground etching, aquatint and drypoint on paper
22 x 26.7 cm (plate); 26.9 x 35.3 cm (sheet)
Signed in pencil C. Pissarro
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.509

Pissarro’s print was based on a painting of the same year, View ofl'Hermitage
through Trees, Pontoise (Kansas, Nelson-Atkins Museum), which was reversed
in printing. It was developed through a long sequence of at least six states.
The composition is similar to works by Cézanne, in which the perspective
of houses seen through trees is reduced and both elements seem to be in the
same plane. It was only in this fifth state that Pissarro achieved a convincing
balance of light and dark elements and a harmony of values. In spite of
the density of work on the plate, it retains an airy luminosity thanks to the
painterly use of aquatint. This state differs only slightly from the sixth state,
printed in an edition of 50 on Japanese paper. At the fifth Impressionist
exhibition in 1880, Pissarro showed four different states of this print ina
single frame — perhaps the first time in history that this had been done.

110
111
 40
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Twilight with Haystacks, 1879
Etching, aquatint, drypoint, sandpaper on paper
10.4 x 17.8 (plate); 20.2 x 25.9 cm (sheet)
Inscribed in pencil No 5 Epreuve d'artiste Crépuscule (cuivre)
signed C. Pissarro and inscribed tiré par E. Degas
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.520

Al
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Twilight with Haystacks, 1879
Printed in blue ink on wove paper
10.3 x 18 cm (plate); 12.7 x 19.5 cm (sheet)
Inscr. in pencil Outremer
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.521

Cat. 40

112
The motif of the haystack first appeared in Pissarro’s art in a painting of 1873
(private collection), nearly two decades before Monet’s celebrated Haystacks
series of 1891. In this masterly print, two small figures on a curved road walk
past two haystacks. On the left a field is bordered on the horizon by a row
of trees. The setting sun lights up the long, horizontal filaments of cloud in
the distance. The composition was initially established in liquid aquatint, in
which the grains of resin were mixed in ether or alcohol and applied to the
place with fingers. Some areas were developed with larger grains of aquatint,
creating different textures and tones. Finally, the forms were clarified with
light etching and drypoint.
Degas was closely involved with the printing of this plate, and many
impressions are inscribed by Pissarro ‘tiré par Degas’. It is likely that it
was Degas who encouraged Pissarro to experiment in printing this plate
in different colours of ink — blue, red, green and brown. Here the contrast
between the impression in black and its counterpart in blue, and their
different inkings, is striking.

113
 42
CAMILLE PISSARRO

Rain Effect, 1879

Aquatint on laid paper
16 x 20.3 cm (plate); 18.9 x 26 cm (sheet)
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.524

43
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Rain Effect, 1879
Aquatint and drypoint on wove paper
15.8 x 20.2 cm (plate); 24.9 x 31.4 cm (sheet)
Inscr. in pencil 2e état no 2 /Effet de pluie
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.525

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114
The Rain Effect has been described as the quintessential Impressionist print. It
demonstrates Pissarro’s attraction to the fugitive effects of light and weather,
with the rain itself reflecting his interest in the woodblocks of Utagawa
Hiroshige, who shared similar concerns. The subject is typically modest: two
peasant women patiently endure a downpour in a harvested hay meadow.
Pissarro began by subtly indicating the figures, trees and haystack in smudges
of aquatint, a porous resin ground that creates speckled tonal effects. He
gradually resolved these forms and the surrounding landscape in successive
states by using fine drypoint, while metal brushes created the dank grass. He
added the driving rain in bravura strokes only in the last two states.

Cat. 43

115
 44
CAMILLE PISSARRO
The Woman on the Road, 1879
Aquatint with etching and drypoint on paper
15.4 x 20.8 cm (plate); 24.6 x 34.5 cm (sheet)
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.511

This is one of Pissarro’s most painterly prints, possibly due to the

encouragement of Degas, who owned two proofs of it. The irregular shape
of the copper plate gives the print an additional informality. The familiar
subject was first lightly etched, then at least three layers of aquatint of
different sizes of grain were added. The billowing clouds were effectively
painted onto the plate, the clouds stopped out before the plate was dipped
into acid. Although Pissarro had initially drawn a border inside the edge of
the plate, he continued to experiment in the margins. In the third state the
village is clearly defined, but he was to do further work with the etching
needle to define more clearly the form and face of the figure.

116
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117
 45
CAMILLE PISSARRO
The Old Cottage, 1879
Aquatint and etching on paper
16.7 x 17cm (plate); 24.9 x 26.5 cm (sheet)
Inscr. in pencil No 1—5e état /La Masure
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.516

CAMILLE PISSARRO
The Old Cottage, 1879
Aquatint, etching and soft ground etching on paper
16.8 x 17 cm (plate); 26.6 x 22.4 cm (sheet)
Inscr. in pencil No 2 /Epreuve dartiste /La Masure and signed C. Pissarro
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.56.514

nel — 8 vtar~
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fie Faken,

Cat. 45

118
Pissarro exhibited three states of this print at the fifth Impressionist
exhibition in 1880, demonstrating once again his conviction that his working
process was worthy of study. In the first state the composition appears
hazy because it is only worked in aquatint. Gradually the hovel and its
surroundings were defined by the etching needle and further applications of
aquatint. The field of cabbages in the foreground changed considerably in
each state; only in later states are the windows of the hovel and the leafless
trees on the right clarified. Almost every impression of this print is different
owing to the careful inking, giving varying effects of mystery and desolation.

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119
 47
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Setting Sun, 1879
Aquatint, drypoint and scraper on paper
11.7 x 15.9 cm (plate); 21.5 x 29.5 cm (sheet)
Inscr. in pencil No. 3 Epreuve d'artiste Soleil couchant and signed C. Pissarro
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.519

In several of the prints of this period Pissarro wished to convey, even in black
and white, sophisticated effects of the sun rising or setting. In this scene
the pollarded willows, daringly placed asymmetrically, stand out above the
horizon; their trunks are vigorously etched over the initial work in aquatint.
On the horizon a row of bushes stands against the white of the clouds. In
this final state, a figure has been added between the trees. The streaks of light
on the hillside and in the foreground, as well as the indication of water, all
contribute to the effect of falling light.

120
120
 CAMILLE PISSARRO

Pere Melon, 1879

Drypoint on laid paper
10.4 x 16.1cm (plate); 20.1 x 28.1 cm (sheet)
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.527

49 . -
CAMILLE PISSARRO

Pére Melon, 1879

Drypoint and aquatint on laid paper
10.2 x 16.3 cm (plate); 18.5 x 27 cm (sheet)
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.529

12)
The etching was based on a painting by Pissarro, Pére Melon resting, made at
about the same time (private collection). This and the other portrait of Old
Mr Melon (cat. 53) were Pissarro’s first paintings of a peasant figure ona
large scale; one shows the subject at work, the other at rest. The print was
developed through six states. In the earliest the composition is very lightly
etched; in the final state the man’s hands are fully modelled. In the fourth
state Pissarro has added a layer of aquatint over almost the whole plate,
leaving the forms and the distances vague.
The plate of this, and several of Pissarro’s other prints, remained in
Degas’s studio until 1891 when Pissarro recovered them, having believed
them lost. This may have encouraged Pissarro to offer artist’s proofs for sale
in the following year.

Cat. 49

123
 50
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Study ofthe Ile Lacroix at Rouen, 1883
Charcoal on paper
12.9 x 17.8 cm (composition); 14.3 x 19.4 cm (sheet)
Stamped C.P. (L. 613e)
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.213

51
CAMILLE PISSARRO
The Ile Lacroix at Rouen, 1883
Drypoint, etching, metal brush and open biting
11.3 x 15.5 cm (plate); 22 x 28.5 cm (sheet)
Inscr. in pencil No. 7 /Lile Lacroix a Rouen /Ep d'art and signed C. Pissarro
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.577

124
Pissarro visited Rouen for the first time in October 1883 and remained for
more than a month ~ he had already arrived by 11 October and returned
to Osny on 28 November. A surviving sketchbook shows that he was
interested in topography and in the effects of light and atmosphere in
a busy port. It was foggy every morning until about 11 o’clock, but the
weather was so changeable that Pissarro complained he could not work
at the same motif for more than a day since it might have disappeared
the next.
The composition of The Ile Lacroix at Rouen was developed through a
sequence of drawings and two etchings, culminating in a painting of 1888,
five years after the initial sketch (Philadelphia Museum of Art). The first
drawing (now lost) established the disposition of the factory on the Ile
Lacroix at the right and the barge in the left foreground. There followed
two etchings and this tenebrous drawing, in which the channel between the
island and the mainland is considerably wider and the whole composition
much flatter. The drawing style is reminiscent of Millet’s in the 1850s,
and also of Seurat’s, but is wholly individual in being used to convey dim
sunlight filtering through the mist. The etching, in which the darkness of
the factory and its billowing smoke contrast more strongly than in the
drawing, was printed in only seven impressions.

Cat. 51

125
 52
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Spring: Plum Trees in Bloom, 1877

Oil on canvas
65.5. x 81cm
Signed and dated C. Pissarro. 1877
Paris, Musée d’Orsay, legs de Gustave Caillebotte, 1894, RF 2733

The Jardin de Maubuisson is a group of kitchen gardens at l’Hermitage

on the quai du Pothuis at Pontoise. They are dominated by the substantial
houses in the rue du Haut de I’Hermitage (now the rue André Lemoine).
This is one of two paintings showing similar views that Pissarro made in
the spring of 1877. Both share a fascination with the superimposition of the
exuberant blossoming plum trees onto the houses on the hillside. Cézanne
painted a similar view, dominated by the geometrical elements of the
architecture, with the gardens reduced to almost abstract touches of paint
(Private collection, USA).
The painting was bought by Gustave Caillebotte at the fourth
Impressionist exhibition in 1879. It was later included in his bequest of
works by his friends and contemporaries to the French state in 1894.

126
127
3
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Pére Melon Sawing Wood, 1879
Oil on canvas
89 x 116.2 cm
Signed and dated C. Pissarro. 79
Private collection

The figure of Pére Melon features in a number of works by Pissarro in 1879.

He is variously shown resting on a grassy hillside with a picnic basket,
sawing wood and chopping logs, appearing in oils, pastel and etching.
Unfortunately he is otherwise unidentified, but the evidence of two pastels
reveals him to be a peasant farmer who lived with his wife in a picturesque
cottage on the outskirts of Pontoise.
This painting was owned by Gauguin when it was shown at the fifth
Impressionist exhibition in 1880. There one critic compared it with the
work of Jean-Francois Millet, to the detriment of Pissarro, who he declared
‘strives viably to attain the rugged, virile simplicity of Millet, the master’. In
fact Pissarro admired Millet, but he did not idolise him. Millet was a believer
and a conservative, and Pissarro increasingly found his peasant scenes too
‘biblical’ and sentimental in tone.

128
129
 +4
CAMILLE PISSARRO
The Pork Butcher, 1883
Oil on canvas
65.1 x 54.3 cm
Signed and dated C. Pissarro 1883
London, Tate, bequeathed by Lucien Pissarro, 1944, 105576

From 1880 the human figure became increasingly dominant in Pissarro’s

compositions, a fact much admired by several of his contemporaries. He 7
liked the teeming market places of Pontoise, Gisors and Eragny, sketching
them frequently in pencil in preparation for finished works in pastel and
bodycolour. This is one of the few oils, painted over the winter of 1882-3.
It gave him considerable trouble. In February 1883 he wrote to Lucien:

I’m stuck here, I’m working as hard as I can on the landscapes I’ve
begun and on my market painting, which I've completely altered.

Pissarro’s main difficulty was in the relationship

between the figures and the stalls. X-rays reveal
that the figure on the right was originally seen
in profile and bending inwards, whereas she is
now facing the viewer. Work on the painting
continued into the summer. Towards the end of
July Pissarro had replaced the old woman in the
centre with the figure of his wife’s niece Nini
(Eugénie Estruc), who was frequently sent to
stay with her aunt. He often arranged a group
of three to form the centre of the picture, giving
a certain classical sense of order. The painting
shows the weekly market held in Pontoise, with
the windows of the church of St Maclou visible
in the upper left corner.

Fig. 36 Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), Compositional study

for ‘The Pork Butcher’, 1883. Blue watercolour over black
chalk. Ashmolean Museum, wA1952.6.229.

130
 5
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Woman Gathering Grass, 1883
Oil on canvas
65 x54cm
Signed and dated C. Pissarro 1883
Private collection, on long-term loan to the Ashmolean Museum, L12144.1

The motif of peasant women gathering grass or weeding first appeared in

a painting that Pissarro exhibited in the seventh Impressionist exhibition
in 1882. In spite of generally hostile criticism he continued to paint these
activities, incorporating one or two figures, and occasionally a group, for
some time.
A few years after this example was completed, Pissarro saw a similar
painting in a dealer’s window. In a letter to Lucien of 14 May 1891, Pissarro
asked him if he remembered this painting, including a sketch to remind him.
He noted that it was a sign of the times that a painting of the same motif
made a year earlier was on sale with a dealer. However, the picture for sale
was, he thought, less good than the one he had kept, because it was made in
the open air rather than in the studio.

There is a calm, a variety, a je ne sais quoi plus artistique! Paintings made

in the studio are sometimes more severe, the colours less pretty, but
on the other hand they are more artistic, more considered.

In the distance can be seen the hamlet of Epluches and the hills of Chaponval
at Auvers-sur-Oise.

132
56
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Design for a Fan: The Harvesters, c.1880
Tempera on silk
32 x 66cm
Signed C. Pissarro
Private collection

This must be an early example of Pissarro’s developing interest in themes

of rural labour, particularly harvest scenes. These represent part of an ideal
co-operative concept in which his market scenes, conceived in similar style,
complete the rural cycle of agriculture.
Pissarro has once again arranged his composition in a series of bands.
Here the foreground, the fields beyond and the sky are all, in miniature,
recorded with perfect clarity. The landscape is complemented by the
harvesters, their individual forms and the way in which their co-operation is
suggested by the cohesion of the group, standing in relief against the light.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the European interest in Japanese art
during the Impressionist period, and the popularity of the fan, as decorative
object as well as an accessory, was at its height. For Pissarro, it may have
been his close collaboration with Degas from the late 1870s that stimulated
his own interest in the form. Degas had to abandon a plan to devote a whole
room to fans for the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879, but still sent in
five of his own. Some sources record that Pissarro exhibited twelve, though
the published catalogue lists only four, but tellingly, and unlike Degas’s
entries, which he labelled only as éventail (fan), Pissarro gave the specific
subject of each of his works: two winter landscapes, one of Lower Norwood,
a sunset, and a scene of women washing clothes. This work,.The Harvesters
takes up a theme that was to be a new source of subject matter during the
next few years, and offers it in a form which, with variations, retained a
special interest for Pissarro, reaching an ultimate unity with its subject in
The Pea-Stakers (cat. 88). .

134
135
 >/
CAMILLE PISSARRO
The Horse Market, Saint Martin’s Fair, 1883
Tempera on silk
26 x 39.5 cm
Signed and dated C. Pissarro 1883
Private collection

The feast of Saint Martin of Tours, patron saint of France, falls on 11 November
and is celebrated with a fair in numerous towns and villages. The fair in
Pontoise was established in the Middle Ages. It became very popular with the
coming of the railway in 1863, attracting hundreds of vendors of horses, cattle
and especially pigs.
While working on Le Jour et La Nuit with Degas (see cats. 37-38), Pissarro
had made an etching of the fair (1879). Prior to that he had made several pencil
sketches, no doubt recognising that the motif was worthy of development.
Here the use of bodycolour allowed for faster painting in bolder tones, since
the colours do not merge, and the mixing is more limited, both on the palette
and the support. Pissarro also altered his technique to include parallel hatching
and commas of paint. The miniature view of Pontoise in the background
reinforces the sense of an enduring tradition linking the market to the town.

136
137
 58
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Study of a Woman Reclining on the Ground, 1882
Black chalk with charcoal and some pastel heightened with gouache
34.8 x 53.7cm
Signed C.P.
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.171

This drawing is related to a painting of Peasant Women Weeding, Pontoise

of 1882, now in a private collection. She appears at the bottom of the
composition without the lower part of her body, as here. Pissarro’s
sophisticated method of preparing for his major oil paintings in the 1880s
increasingly involved large drawings of single figures. In this powerful
example the figure was first sketched in black chalk, with the dress redrawn
in charcoal and the kerchief added in pastel. It has been suggested that the
pastel may have been added in the 1890s, when the artist’s handling of the
medium became more rugged.

138
139
 »9
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Study ofa Milking Scene at Eragny-sur-Epte, 1884
Watercolour over black chalk on paper
15.7 x 19.6 cm
Signed C. Pissarro
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.223

As Brettell and Lloyd point out, milking scenes were not common in
French nineteenth-century paintings of rural life. The study comes from
a sketchbook containing other homely farmyard subjects, milk churns
and another study of the woman who is milking. They suggest that it was
a preparatory study for a painting and note that Pissarro later adapted the
work to include in the Travaux des Champs.

140
.4

ena
se
I

141
 60
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Woman Gathering Grass, 1881
Pastel, heightened in places with pink wash on rough paper
30.2 x 42.5 cm
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.153

This study is related to a painting, Peasant Woman Gathering Grass, of 1881; it

may have been a preparatory piece, or else Pissarro developed it later. The
work dates from the period in which Pissarro became interested in larger-
scale figure painting, possibly partly in response to Degas’s work; the two
were working closely together at this time on their planned Le Jour et la Nuit
project. The figures, usually women, are often dressed in blue; they are
sometimes shown engaged in work, but just as often at rest. As in this pastel,
the landscape is often restricted, not much more than a backdrop, so that the
pose of the figure, whether working or at rest, is particularly expressive.

142
 61
CAMILLE PISSARRO
A Corner of|’Hermitage, Pontoise, 1878
Oil on canvas
55 x 65cm
Signed and dated C. Pissarro 1878
Kunstmuseum Basel, Geschenk einiger Kunstfreunde,
mit einem Beitrag der Basler Regierung erworben 1912, Inv 871

While he was living in Pontoise, Pissarro concentrated not on the panoramic

views which could be obtained from the top of the hill in /Hermitage,
and which were recommended in a contemporary guidebook, but on the
multiplicity of views of the hillside itself and the distinct ‘corners’ to be
found in the densely populated area. Many of his paintings showed the rue
de l’Hermitage, but the most characteristic dispense with this traditional
means of composition, focusing instead on the ‘sensation’ suggested by
the agricultural activity in the small fields and cottage gardens. A Corner of
l'Hermitage, Pontoise depicts the houses in the rue du Fond-de-l’Hermitage
(now rue Maria-Deraisme) at the foot of the Céte des Gratte Coqs. Pissarro
had painted a similar view in 1875 (Basel). Here, however, the brushstrokes
are typically shorter and more staccato, unifying sky, landscape and houses
in a sophisticated composition.

144
145
Creative Collaborations

Throughout his life Pissarro formed close friendships with other

artists, who respected his individuality even when they disagreed with
his politics. Along with Monet and Sisley, he defined the early phase
of the Impressionist landscape, sharing with them an interest in the
capturing of particular effects of light or weather. Pissarro worked
most closely with Cézanne between 1872 and 1885, often painting the
same motifs side by side. Their collaboration ended when Cézanne
returned definitively to Provence, though they remained good friends;
shortly before his own death, Cézanne told his dealer that ‘Old
Pissarro was a father to me’. Pissarro was instrumental in persuading
Paul Gauguin to abandon his career as a stockbroker and invited him
to exhibit at the fifth Impressionist Exhibition in 1880. However, he
did not understand Gauguin’s interest in the primitive, and the men
drifted apart after 1882. Pissarro’s experiments in printmaking with
Edgar Degas in 1879-80 resulted in the most truly Impressionist of all
series of etchings.

Opposite: detail of cat. 67

147
 62
CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926)
The Boulevard de Pontoise at Argenteuil, 1875
Oil on canvas
60.2 x 81.2 cm
Signed Claude Monet
Kunstmuseum Basel, Ankauf 1953, Inv 2320

On his return from exile in London, Monet, like Pissarro, settled in a small
town, though one in his case not far from Paris; he remained at Argenteuil,
on the Seine, until 1878. Renoir and Sisley also painted there, as on occasion
did Manet. For a time Argenteuil must have seemed to be the focus of the
new style of painting, soon to be called Impressionism. Meanwhile Pissarro
and Cézanne doggedly followed a different path at Pontoise.
Atmospheric effects, fog, rain, snow or changing light provided Monet
with all the variety he needed in a subject. He had long ago discovered
the colours to be found in shadows and reflections on snow, and in the
winters of 1874—6 he painted eighteen such scenes. Within the simplifying
perspective that he liked Monet paired the shape of sky and ground, while
an overall bluish tonality cast by the sky reinforces the picture’s visual unity.
Snow is the principal character, softening the edges of everything, even the
meagre trees. The melting touches of the brush almost assume the identity
of the icy flakes, to dance in front of the picture.

148
149
 63
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Snow Scene at Pontoise, 1875

Oil on canvas
54.2 x 73cm
Signed and dated C. Pissarro. 1875
Kunstmuseum Basel, mit ordentlichen Ankaufsmitteln und einem
Beitrag der Max Geldner-Stiftung erworben 1991, Inv G 1991.16

Having spent a recent winter at Montfoucault, deep in the Brittany

countryside, Pissarro knew very well the discomfort and hazards of snow.
Communication could be cut off and it could prove dangerous, often deadly,
to people and animals. His scene of snow at Pontoise is at the opposite
extreme from Monet’s work of the same year (cat. 62).
There is no single viewpoint in this work. The high ground in front is
a study in the transformation of a familiar sight by the effects of snow. To
the right, along a diagonal and beside a garden wall, a carter stops to speak,
perhaps to complain of the weather to a passer-by. The brilliant green of
the canopy, a detail which allows us not to miss this encounter, is typical of
Pissarro’s perennial interest in the human aspect of the scene.
As well as the slope of the foreground, the row of trees helps to block
what might otherwise be the enjoyment of the scene beyond, with bands of
snow gently melting.

150
151
 64
CAMILLE PISSARRO
The Cote des Boeufs, Pontoise, 1877
Oil on canvas
114.9 x 87.6 cm
Signed and dated C. Pissarro. 1877.
National Gallery, London, presented by C. S. Carstairs through the Art Fund, 1926, NG4197

Ina letter to Eugéne Murer of 13 October 1877, Pissarro referred to ‘autumn

and its sadnesses’, a feeling exemplified in this picture. The Cote des Boeufs
is a hillside off the rue de l’Hermitage in Pontoise. It derived its name from a
path that crossed it called the ‘sente des Boves’ or ‘sente des Boeufs’.
Pissarro had first painted the group of houses in the rue Vieille-de-
l'Hermitage about ten years earlier. Here, and in a horizontal composition
made in the same year (Paris, Musée d’Orsay), they are seen through a
robustly orchestrated network of trees in late autumn. The surface of the
painting is densely worked, in a varied palette. The nearly abstract effect
of the short brushstrokes and the rhythm of the tree trunks and branches
almost conceal the presence of two figures walking on the path at the left.
The painting was shown at the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877.
There one critic described it as an ‘attractive painting, a small house hidden
away in the forest, which struck us by the firmness and simplicity of the
brushwork’.

152
 65
PAUL CEZANNE (1839-1906)
The Cote Saint-Denis, at Pontoise, 1877
Oil on canvas
65.4 x 54.2 cm
Signed P. Cézanne
Private collection

Pissarro’s scene (cat. 64) presents his screen as barely penetrable to the
eye, so solidly grille-like in its form; it is very unlike the composition of
1869 (cat. 8), an altogether simpler version of the subject. Cézanne's view
is different from both. His picture gives a stronger impression of being in
a wood, while the problem of trying to see through the trees (here they are
hardly a screen) has vanished. The touch is light, the painting thin, with
patches of what appears to be blank canvas visible here and there, high in the
trees. The trees themselves are fluidly rendered and seem indifferent to the
question of the view glimpsed between them - it is simply there. A brilliant
touch of green in the fork of a tree looks like a sudden idea, part of the
improvised character of the work. This painting reveals the freedom within
economy shown in some of Cézanne’s watercolours.

154
 66
PAUL CEZANNE (1839-1906)
Dr Gachet’s House at Auvers-sur-Oise, 1872
Oil on canvas
56 x 47cm
Rudolf Staechelin Collection. On long-term loan at Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/ Basel

When Pissarro and his family returned from London to live at Pontoise, his
friend Dr Gachet —a physician, amateur artist and collector — had recently
fitted up a house for himself at Auvers, just under four miles away. At the end of
the year Cézanne and his own little family also left Paris to settle in a house at
Auvers, very close to Dr Gachet’s own. We are told that Cézanne painted there
and several of his still-life pictures, containing objects closely resembling those
in Gachet’s collection, seem to confirm this.
Gachet’s house must have come to seem like a second home to Cézanne.
He painted several views of it during the year in which he lived at Auvers, often
walking over to Pontoise to work out of doors with Pissarro. When Pissarro
chose to include a painting of his own in the background of his portrait of
Cézanne (cat. 14), it may be that he chose to evoke one that interested the
younger artist. The work reappears in the background of one of Cézanne’s still-
life paintings from that period.
The simplified form of the house in Pissarro’s own picture, as well as the
rectangles of the window that match the larger rectangle of the house, the
screen of trees and the curving road, all reappear here. This house is seen from
the side, however; tiny areas of blank canvas, by isolating it, give the building
emphasis. It rises above a high horizon, the shutters bright dabs of colour, and
is close to not one but two curving roads — yet the scene appears as a single
statement, contained and unified.

156
 67
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Apples and Pears in a Circular Basket, 1872
Oil on canvas
46.2 x 55.8cm
Signed and dated C. Pissarro. 1872
The Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation, on long-term loan
to the Princeton University Art Museum, L.1988.62.15

By the second half of the nineteenth century still life was enjoying a revival
of interest in France. Manet, who had such a following among the younger
Impressionists, not only produced a number of such pictures, but also
deliberately introduced elements of still life, with startling effect, into several of
his subject pictures. Among these were his portraits (see fig. 24, p. 28).
However, Pissarro painted few still-life pictures — perhaps most often
in the years when he and Cézanne worked together at Pontoise. Cézanne’s
frequent and powerful treatment of the subject was to raise it to a high pitch
of expressiveness. Pissarro’s piece, on the other hand, has a more intimate,
domestic character: a light ground, where painters more often favour a darker
one; the apples and pears freshly picked, in a basket on a tablecloth recently
taken from a drawer, to judge by the stiff folds of fabric. We are presumably in
the dining room of the family now established at Pontoise.
The placing of the basket is careful, tip-tilted as if offering the ripe fruit
to our view. Its position allows the rim, with the arch of the handle, to frame
a rose in one of the garlands of the wallpaper design — an effect of stripes
against what may be intended as a ground of watered silk. Apart from the
delicately painted roses and the autumnal richness of colour of the fruit, the
palette is muted, its restrained contrasts of blue and brownish pink recurrent
in Pissarro’s work during these early years in Pontoise. Pissarro was able to sell
the work almost at once to Paul Durand-Ruel, the dealer whom he had met
during his short stay in London and whose purchases had at last given him
some feeling of security.

158
159
 68
PAUL CEZANNE (1839-1906)
Milk Can and Apples, 1879
Oil on canvas
50.2 x 61cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the William S. Paley Collection, sPc6.1990

For a year from late 1872, when Pissarro and Cézanne often worked together
and thought about each other’s work, they painted a number of still-life
pictures — an unusual subject for Pissarro. Several were of flowers arranged
in a series of pots and vases, probably from Dr Gachet’s collection. For Apples
and Pears in a Circular Basket (cat. 67) Pissarro adopted the flattened perspective
and forward tilting that he also used in his Bouquet ofPink Peonies (cat. 11).
In 1874 Cézanne returned to Paris, though he continued to visit Pontoise.
In 1877, apparently in Pissarro’s studio, he painted his Still Life with Soup
Tureen (Paris, Musée d’Orsay), another basket of apples and pears. On the
wall behind hangs Pissarro’s Rue de Gisors, which also appears in his portrait
of Cézanne (cat. 14). It was as if during those years, in still-life as well as
in landscape, the two artists were speaking to one another through paint.
Cézanne then spent most of 1878 at LEstaque, just west of Marseille. The
mountains of Provence provided a very different kind of landscape scenery
from Pontoise, and yet the lessons learned from and with Pissarro are still
evident in his work.
Milk Can and Apples is one of several still-life pictures that Cézanne
painted after his return from Provence. Far removed from Pissarro’s Apples
and Pears, suggestive of an ordered family life, Cezanne’s work is like a
landscape, a world in itself: the peaks and crevices of folded linen are the
mountains, beneath which lies the apples’ domain. An overall blueness
colours the scene, while the warm tones of the fruit heighten its intensity. As
in Pissarro’s picture, the wallpaper plays a part. Here, however, it echoes the
forms of the fruit, ‘the shadow of a shadow, an echo of his own art’, as Meyer
Schapiro wrote of a comparable still life from the same period.

160
161
 69
PAUL GAUGUIN (1848-1903)
Interior with Aline, 1881
Oil on canvas
52.4 x 60.3 cm
Private collection, on long-term loan to Sheffield Museums, V1S.L1.901

Although Gauguin’s interiors are usually said to owe more to Degas than any
other artist, it is arguable that, as in his landscapes, Pissarro’s influence was
stronger. The atmosphere of cosy domesticity in this portrait of Aline Gauguin
is found in some of Pissarro’s portraits of his children, particularly in the
portrait of The Young Country Servant, which includes the diminutive figure of
Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro, born in 1878 (fig. 37).
Aline was the second of Gauguin’s five children and the only girl: born
on 24 December 1877, she was to die prematurely at the age of nineteen. Her
mother, Mette Gad, had met Gauguin in 1872 and the couple were married the
following year. In late 1880 the family moved into a substantial house with
garden at 8 rue Carcel, Vaugirard (15e), where they remained for three years.
Gauguin painted both indoors and outdoors, as well as making expeditions to
Pontoise to work with Pissarro.
In this work Aline is shown sitting quietly, concentrating on the orange she
is holding. The scene is painted in rapid, short brushstrokes, the perspective
flattened and the wall behind the sofa enlivened with flecks of colour
reminiscent of Renoir. This may have been the Still Life with Oranges shown at the
seventh Impressionist exhibition in 1882. Around the same time Gauguin made
a bust in black wax of Aline, who was his favourite child (Paris, Musée d’Orsay).

Fig. 37 Camille Pissarro (1830-1903),

The Young Country Servant, 1882. Oil on
canvas. Tate, London.

162
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 7O
PAUL GAUGUIN (1848-1903)
Apple Trees at I’Hermitage, 1879
Oil on canvas
65 x100cm
Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Legat Dr Max Fretz, 1086

Gauguin was still working as a stockbroker when he met Pissarro in 1874.

The older artist encouraged him to take up painting full time and was
instrumental in introducing him to the Impressionist group: he showed
a sculpture with them in 1879 and paintings in 1880 and 1881. Under
Pissarro’s influence, Gauguin’s palette became lighter and brighter and his
compositions more luminous. His colour is still strong, however, and his
contrasts forceful.
Gauguin made three paintings of the apple trees at Hermitage in 1879.
The orchard was on top of the hill on the east side of the hamlet where
Pissarro lived for much of the 1870s. This is the largest of the three paintings,
completed either at Pontoise or in Gauguin’s studio in Vaugirard. Unlike
Pissarro, who at this period chose to vary his brushstrokes according to the
character of the motif, Gauguin applied his paint consistently: all areas were
treated as equal, be they sky, foliage or grass. Gauguin showed great interest
in the strong shadows that dominate the foreground, in the character of
branches and in the decorative effects created by the foliage. Although the
grass is brown, the season is probably early summer, before the apples have
formed. The inclusion of the single figure hard at work in the background
reflects the influence of Pissarro.

164
165
vA
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Farm at Montfoucault in snow, 1874

Oil on canvas
54x 65cm
Signed and dated C. Pissarro. 1876
Ashmolean Museum, presented by Esther Pissarro, 1951, WA1951.225.2

Pissarro spent the winter of 1874-5 with his friend Ludovic Piette, staying on
his farm at Montfoucault in Brittany. This picture belongs among the study
of weather effects that Pissarro began at Louveciennes towards 1870 and
continued in London, as well as among the rural subjects on which at that
time he was engaged. Such subjects were undertaken partly on the advice
of his friend Théodore Duret, a journalist and art critic, but certainly also
following the attachment Pissarro had developed, while living in Pontoise,
to scenes of rural life and work — whether of kitchen gardens (cat. 52) or the
wider view of his Landscape near Pontoise of 1872 (cat. 10).
Jean-Francois Millet died in January 1875, perhaps at the time Pissarro took
up this picture. For obvious reasons the piece has been compared with the
work of the earlier artist: certainly Pissarro was as responsive to the colour
blue as Millet had been, and as Cézanne was to become, but the composition
has a marked character of its own. The triangular relation of the larger and
the smaller building, the space given to the description of the roof, the shapes
of doors and blank windows combine to give a weight to the composition
that balances the most Millet-like aspect, the central figure in blue with his
yellow bundle, at the base of the triangle. Blue and yellow merge in the green
gate and echo faintly throughout, in keeping with Pissarro’s notion of the
range of colour to be found in a winter scene. The whole has something of the
‘painterly’ manner and thick surface that may reflect his recent working with
Cézanne, as well as recalling the practice of Courbet.

166
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 72
LUDOVIC PIETTE (1826-78)
The Vegetable Market on the Place du Petit-Martroy, Pontoise, 1876
Oil on canvas
72.5 x 48cm
Signed and dated Piette /1876
Musée Camille Pissarro, Musées de Pontoise, Inv.P.1978.10

Pissarro’s dear and loyal friend Ludovic Piette trained in Couture’s studio,
but managing the farm at Montfoucault, which he owned, must have
turned him into a very occasional painter. Piette and his wife delighted in
the extended visits made by the Pissarro family, to whom they were both
deeply attached. Piette also came at intervals to stay at Pontoise. There in
1876 he painted this market scene.
The Vegetable Market on the Place du Petit-Martroy, Pontoise anticipates
works painted by Pissarro some years later. Here the dominant presence of
St Maclou is in keeping with Pissarro’s later settings of the market, whether
Pontoise or Gisors, as if emblematic of the enduring tradition of the town.
Piette’s cheerful crowd sits rather oddly with the venerable position of
the church: there is an overall sense of holiday and communal enjoyment.
Pissarro invited Piette to exhibit at the third Impressionist exhibition, held
in April 1877, and in response he sent 31 works, both oils and watercolours.

168
169
Neo-Impressionism

In 1885 Pissarro met Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, both friends
of his eldest son Lucien. He was immediately interested in the
experiments that Seurat was making, inspired by his reading of
contemporary treatises on colour theory. These led the artists to
apply the paint in small dots of complementary colours, creating
a new luminosity of effect. Together with Lucien and the younger
artists, Pissarro showed in a separate room in the eighth and last
Impressionist exhibition in 1886. A sympathetic critic called the new
technique ‘Neo-Impressionism’ — a natural development away from
the spontaneity of Impressionism towards a more considered and
permanent art. However, the new technique proved extremely time-
consuming. Pissarro’s output plummeted and his dealers found it
difficult to sell these pictures. However, perhaps as compensation,
he turned once again to watercolour. He made many freely painted
landscapes in saturated washes, not as preparatory studies but as
works in themselves.

Opposite: detail of cat. 77

171
 We
PAUL CEZANNE (1839-1906)
Valley ofthe Oise, c.1880
Oil on canvas
72 x 91cm
Private Collection

After a long absence painting in Provence, Cézanne returned to stay in

Pontoise from May to October 1881. Joachim Pissarro has persuasively
linked his work from that period to a renewed engagement with Pissarro’s
early paintings at Pontoise. Valley ofthe Oise, in its turn, has the look of a
backward glance down and across from a certain distance. The exuberant
energy of the clouds almost recalls Cézanne’s work before his transformative
encounter with Pissarro: the houses in the valley, slightly isolated from one
another, are not a focus of attention, though the red and the blue of the
roofs and the screening of the trees is faintly reminiscient of Cézanne and
Pissarro’s paintings of the Cote des Boeufs. The foreground is a dense, energetic
interweaving of touches in green and brown, in what has been called
Cézanne’s ‘directional stroke’ — sometimes vertical, sometimes diagonal.
At this time Pissarro had adopted the directional stroke in his gouaches,
much admired by Seurat. With this in mind, it is interesting to note that it
was Pissarro who apparently persuaded Signac to buy Valley ofthe Oise.

172
173
 —

74
PAUL SIGNAC (1863-1935)
Place Saint-Pierre, Winter, 1883—4
Oil on canvas
65.4 x 54cm
Kunstmuseum Basel, Geschenk von Dr. Hans Graber, 1947, Inv. 2049

Signac was quick to disappoint his family’s hope of a career for him in
architecture. He left school early, frequented exhibitions, particularly of
Impressionist painters, and soon developed a preference for Monet. His
mother settled in Asniéres in 1880, where Signac began painting along the
banks of the Seine. In 1883 he briefly attended Emile Belin’s free studio in
Montmartre.
This picture, dating from those early years, takes as its subject a not
obviously attractive scene: the building site of the church of the Sacré-Coeur,
begun eight years earlier on the heights of Montmartre. The houses on
the right may echo those of Cézanne, but the long, bold brushstrokes have
more in common with recent paintings by Monet, particularly his Church
at Varengeville— probably among the many views of Varengeville featured
in Durand-Ruel’s Monet exhibition of March 1883. The little figures lightly
peopling the scene here and enjoying the spectacle belong entirely to Signac.
Early in the following year Signac wrote to Monet telling him of his
admiration and asking for advice. Monet responded to the young artist and
the two men met; they remained friends thereafter. Pissarro came to know
Signac through his old friend Guillaumin, but the acquaintance increased
through a whole network of connections between Lucien Pissarro and his
young anarchist friends, several of whom were soon to be drawn to the
developing practice of Neo-Impressionism.
In 1886, at Pissarro’s invitation, Signac showed 18 works at the eighth and
last Impressionist exhibition, in a separate section. This separateness was a
ruling imposed on Pissarro, but one that he found useful after all in focusing
attention on what he then saw as a logical development of Impressionism.
Within a year Signac had met and made friends with Van Gogh, whose
scenes of the edges of Paris — neither town nor country — share the bleakness
of some of Signac’s earliest subjects.

174
 /D
CAMILLE PISSARRO

Apple Tree in the Sunlight, Eragny, c.1887

Oil on panel
20.7 x 28.2 cm
Stamped C.P.
Collection Jean Faure, Musée Faure, Aix les Bains, France, 1948.1.73

176
76
CAMILLE PISSARRO
View ofBazincourt, Sunlight, c.1887
Oil on panel
20.6 x 28.4 cm
Stamped C.P.
Collection Jean Faure, Musée Faure, Aix les Bains, France, 1948.1.74

‘ 7
Wega ee

177
 es
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Country Path, c.1886
Oil on panel
23.5 x 15.6 cm
Private collection

All of Seurat’s major paintings were the result of elaborate preparation, both
with drawings and with oil sketches painted directly on small, unprimed
panels. Although he sketched and drew constantly, Pissarro generally did
not make oil sketches for his large paintings. However, in 1886-7, when he
was making his first experiments in pointillism, he did make about a dozen
small sketches in the manner of Seurat. The motifs were all familiar — the
countryside around Eragny and Bazincourt. The first (cat. 75) depicts the
distinctive shape of the apple tree, noting the kink in its trunk, and is a study
for Apple-Picking, Eragny, completed in 1888 (cat. 81). The second panel (cat. 76)
shows the spire of Bazincourt church poking through the trees, across
the valley from Eragny. The third (cat. 77), possibly the earliest, takes up a
familiar and favourite motif, a path.
The studies date from the period when the impressionable and gregarious
Signac introduced Pissarro to Seurat, as well as to a circle of young writers
interested in the development of a divisionist, or Neo-Impressionist,
technique. The manner of these oil studies served as a preliminary stage
in this method. Pissarro obviously valued them in their own right and had
planned to show a selection in a single frame at Georges Petit’s international
exhibiton of 1887. Perhaps in the end he sent only one, complaining later to
Lucien that ‘even my poor little panel was put aside’.

178
179
 78
PAUL SIGNAC (1863-1935)
The Port at Portrieux (study no.3), 1888
Oil on panel
16 x 24cm
Private collection

lo
PAUL SIGNAC (1863-1935)
Portrieux, La Comtesse (study), 1888
Oil on panel
15 x 25cm
Private collection

Cat. 78

180

e
 In 1888 Signac spent July at Portrieux, on the Brittany coast, together with
his friend, the writer Jean Ajalbert. He planned a series of pictures to capture
the character of this little port, painting nine works in the Neo-Impressionist
_ manner, prepared by oil studies on small wood panels — then a common
practice. The studies took the form of rapid notations of colour and design,
to be translated into the dot technique at a later stage.
The first, a harbour scene, Signac planned as a storm, perhaps already
evident in the insistent patter of touches of white. In the finished work
(Stuttgart), the waves appear as a series of regular and inexorable lines, the
boats placed at measured intervals. Signac had recently absorbed Charles
Henry’s theories of harmony, rhythm and proportion, and adjusted the final
pictures in accordance with these. His own habit of giving opus numbers to
some of his pictures suggests that he shared current ideas on the affinity of
painting and music. For the finished painting of La Comtesse (the name of the
beach), Signac emphasised the forms of the promontory and the island. He
also made the division of land and sea more marked, under a pale blue sky,
with the whole accented by a strong contrast of blue, and a warm orange
between land and sea.

Cat. 79

181
SO
CAMILLE PISSARRO
View from my Window, Eragny, 1886-8
Oil on canvas
65 x 81cm
Signed and dated C. Pissarro. 1888
Ashmolean Museum, presented by Mrs Lucien Pissarro, 1950, WA19 50.185

The Pissarro family moved to the village of Eragny-sur-Epte, north of the

market town of Gisors in Normandy, in 1884. The house that they rented
until 1892, and then bought with the help of a loan from Monet, was large
enough for the growing family; it was also set in extensive grounds, with
views towards the village church to the north and across an orchard and
meadow towards the river Epte to the west. This painting shows the view
from a first-floor window on the north-west corner. On the far left is the
large barn where Pissarro established his studio in 1894. On the right a brick
wall capped with tiles separates the vegetable garden from the orchard and
field below. The spire of St Martin’s church at Bazincourt appears on the
horizon. In the orchard the apple tree of the oil study (cat. 75) can clearly be
distinguished.
The painting was completed by May 1886, when it was shown among
the Neo-Impressionist group in the final Impressionist exhibition. Pissarro
followed Seurat’s scientific treatment of colour, but modified the dot
technique, preferring to adapt the brushstroke to the subject, with short
strokes in the red roof, much thicker dabs in the foreground and more
delicate touches in the background. Unfortunately, in spite of praise from
Fénéon and other friends, Pissarro’s new style did not appeal to his dealer,
Durand-Ruel. Pissarro complained: ‘it seems that the subject'is unsellable
because of the red roof and the farmyard, exactly what gives it whole
character to the painting, which has a primitive-modern stamp to it’.
Despite his complaints, Pissarro felt obliged to rework and resign the
painting in 1888. He became increasingly aware that for him the pointillist
technique was inhibiting. His output fell dramatically, and by 1890 he had
abandoned the technique. His interest remained, however, and after Seurat’s
death he wrote to Lucien: ‘I think it will have consequences which will one
day be of the utmost importance for art’.

182
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 81
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Apple Picking, Eragny, 1887-8
Oil on canvas
61 x 74cm
Signed and dated C. Pissarro. 1888
Dallas Museum of Art, Munger Fund, 1955.17.M

Pissarro took particular care in the preparation of this picture, its

symmetrical, balanced arrangement confirming careful calculation.
The high horizon allows concentration on the tree, placed just off-centre.
The ‘dot’ technique provides a shimmering background for what is an almost
emblematic image of sunlit, co-operative work and rural fruitfulness.
Pisssarro had worked on the theme of apple pickers from the first half of
the 1870s, when he turned to the rural subjects that his friend Duret was soon
to encourage. From 1881 Pissarro returned to the subject again, in a series of
paintings and drawings, varying the roles of the figures. It was not a subject
Millet ever painted, although the emblematic character of this picture could
owe something to Millet’s Man Grafting a Tree of 1855 (Munich).
Pissarro’s picture is a synthesis of several of his own earlier pictures, but is
of a different order, having something of the choreographed and decorative
— even lyrical — character of the Pea Stakers (cat. 88). The oil sketch Apple Tree in
the Sunlight (cat. 75) is one of several studies for it in a range of media, evidence
not only of Pissarro’s unusually careful preparation of the composition, but
also of his attachment to the form of this particular apple tree, with its bent
branch. There is a similarly bent branch on a tree visible in the orchard at
Eragny, in View from my Window (cat. 80). This crooked tree appears in several
other pictures, and in a drawing in the Ashmolean, but here the trunk is
almost upright, in keeping with the simplicity of the design. Fénéon wrote
with delight of the classic character of this tree when the picture appeared, to
critical acclaim, at the 6th exhibition of the Cercle des XX in Brussels in 1889.

186
187
 82
LUCIEN PISSARRO (1863-1944)
The Church at Eragny, 1886
Oil on canvas
Eun Goosen
Ashmolean Museum, bequeathed by Esther Pissarro, 1952, WA1952.6.7

In 1885 Camille and Lucien Pissarro made the acquaintance of Georges

Seurat and Paul Signac. Father and son then began exploring the new
technique, variously called divisionism or pointillism before it was
christened Neo-Impressionism by the sympathetic critic Félix Fénéon.
Lucien had been painting for some years, although his main artistic activity
was providing illustrations for periodicals. He first exhibited in 1886 and
submitted four paintings and a group of illustrations to the last Impressionist
exhibition in 1886. Here they were displayed in ‘Batiment B’, along with
works by the other Neo-Impressionists. Surprisingly, it was not this view
of Eragny church, painted in round dabs of paint, but La Maison de la Sourde,
executed in much more varied strokes. The view is taken from a bend in
the path leading from the Pré du Chéne across the river Epte from Eragny
to Bazincourt; it includes the spire of the church of Saint Martin in the
centre, with the sixteenth-century brick manor house on the right. Camille
had painted the same view from the same spot in 1884, but he included the
buildings in the middle distance that Lucien chose to omit.

188
189
 33
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Young Woman Making a Bonfire, c.1888
Bodycolour on paper
59 x 46.5 cm
Stamped C.P.
Private collection

At the exhibition of the Cercle des XX that took place in Brussels in 1889,
Pissarro showed a painting of Hoar-Frost, Peasant Girl making a Fire (formerly
Musée d’Orsay). The genesis of the subject began with rough sketches in
pencil and then watercolour, experimenting with the position of the two
figures, although all the studies include the woman in the act of breaking
a large branch. This gouache shows only the principal figure, however,
with the bonfire already burning well. Otherwise all the elements of the
composition are present: the smoke billowing in the strong wind of early
morning, the sun rising over the plain and the line of trees parallel to the
top of the picture. The finished oil insists on the coldness of the morning.
Pissarro worked on the composition slowly for more than a year, between
May 1887 and July 1888, when it was finally completed.

190
191
34
VINCENT VAN GOGH (1853-1890)

Restaurant de la Siréne, Asniéres, 1887

Oil on canvas
52 x 64.4cm
Ashmolean Museum, bequeathed by Dr Erich Alport, 1972, WA1972.18

Van Gogh arrived in Paris in February 1886. He took up residence with his
brother Theo, who had begun to deal in Impressionist paintings, and remained
for two years. In February 1888 he left for the sunshine of Arles. Van Gogh’s
exposure to the work of the Neo-Impressionists at the eighth and final
Impressionist exhibition, as well as his meeting with the artists themselves,
encouraged him to explore colour theories and to abandon the thickly
impasted, darkly realist style that he had developed in Holland. Instead he
adopted a much lighter palette and, as here, short, straw-like strokes of paint
on a canvas primed in grey.
Lucien and Camille Pissarro were to become firm friends with Van Gogh,
who dedicated a painting of boots ‘a l’ami Lucien’ in 1886. In the following year
Theo began to sell paintings by Camille. It was also Camille who introduced
Van Gogh to the homeopathic doctor Paul Gachet, under whose care at
Auvers-sur-Oise the artist spent his final months.
Asniéres, a pleasure resort on the Seine downstream from Paris, was
popular with artists. Van Gogh painted there with Signac in April and May
1887, and again later in the year with Emile Bernard. As he told his sister
Wilhelmina, Asniéres enabled him to see ‘more colour’. The restaurant de la
Siréne at 7 boulevard de la Seine (now quai du Docteur Derveux) near the Pont
d’Asniéres was a large establishment comprising three buildings. In this view
Van Gogh has painted it from the riverbank below, rendering the ground floor
invisible. He probably worked from life, in the early morning, the atmosphere
quiet in spite of the flags. The perspective lines that he used for the work are
visible to the naked eye. Van Gogh also painted a more substantial view of the
restaurant from street level at roughly the same period (Paris, Musée d'Orsay).

192
193
35
LUCIEN PISSARRO (1863-1944)
Interior of a Music Hall, 1888
Watercolour and gouache on silk
18.4 x 22.5 cm
Trustees of the British Museum, London, 1949,0411.77.
Bequeathed by Campbell Dodgson, 1949

By the late 1880s scenes of performance were not uncommon in France.

Daumier makes use of a comparable approach in his images of a theatre
audience closely observed from behind against the light from the stage, while
Degas’s ballet scenes of the 1870s, with their close study of the orchestra’s
musicians against the light from the stage, offer an obvious comparison.
However, Richard Thomson has found a more precise starting point for this
work (and for a similar composition by Louis Hayet): not a picture but an
actual performance. In January 1888 Georges Pissarro wrote to his father that
he, Lucien and their friend Hayet had recently been going to draw at a café-
concert, La Cigale, on the boulevard Rochechouart.
Lucien and Hayet must have known some of their friend Georges Seurat’s
preparatory drawings and studies for his work of 1887-8, The Circus Side-
Show (La Parade) (New York, Metropolitan Museum). Exhibited in the spring
of 1888, it was the most famous and sophisticated version of the subject
(though showing a circus rather than a café-concert). The two friends were
probably also familiar with the early stages of Seurat’s painting.
Here Lucien draws on the right side of the composition. The curious
tall hat with its cockade is almost identical to Seurat’s and the door also
corresponds, though the figure on the stage relates instead to some of
Seurat’s café-concert drawings. Lucien was content to make the figures the
subject in his composition. He added an extra row of them, like a mirror
image in which the strange hat reappears. Like Hayet, Lucien used the
power of Neo-Impressionist technique to suggest the effect of light seen
in darkness. However, the two men employ the technique differently, as
another of Hayet’s pictures (cat. 86) serves to illustrate.

194
195
 86
LOUIS HAYET (1864-1940)
Fairground at Night, 1888-9
Oil on cardboard
19.5 x 27cm
Musée Camille Pissarro, Musées de Pontoise, Inv. P 1988.1

Hayet’s family was extremely poor and he left school at 12, taking ona
variety of jobs. He managed to attend the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs for
a short time, but chiefly taught himself by observation. When Lucien
Pissarro first met him, Hayet was painting outdoors at Pontoise; he soon
became a family friend. Camille Pissarro would comment on his work from
time to time with varying degrees of praise and criticism, as he did for his
own children.
In 1886 he invited Hayet to exhibit at the eighth and last Impressionist
exhibition, but Hayet, perhaps having nothing ready, declined; he later
exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, with whom he came to be closely
associated. By then Hayet was working in a Neo-Impressionist manner,
though in this picture it seems he had not entirely abandoned an earlier,
more freely-painted manner of his own.
Hayet had a liking for Paris night scenes and for popular entertainment,
a taste shared to some extent by Lucien. It was also part of a growing
interest in such themes as the café-concert and the music hall. Several
recorded comments suggest that Pissarro preferred Hayet’s daylight subjects.
A landscape of the river Oise in the Neo-Impressionist manner, now in
Cleveland, might give some idea of a landscape he particularly admired
when it appeared at an exhibition of the Indépendants in 1889.

196
Be Onrctaiey
las

197
 87
PAUL SIGNAC (1863-1935)
The Seine at Herblay, Morning Mist — Opus 214 (fan), 1889
Tempera on silk
31.7 x 68.5 cm
Musée Camille Pissarro, Musées de Pontoise, Inv. P 1983.2

In this work Signac has adopted the fan-shape popular at the time, here
particularly well suited to the subject. He has made use of a view he painted
in 1889 (the opus numbers would seem to suggest a slightly later date for the
fan), when he spent several weeks of late summer with Maximilien Luce at
Herblay. This small resort on the Seine is visible on the left of the painting.
Here Signac and Luce spent much of their time in the former’s small
sailing boat, to which Signac was particularly attached. The idea for this
composition probably arose on one of their excursions.
In this evocation of colour muted and sound muffled by the mist, Signac
comes closest to his two most admired painters, Monet and Seurat.

198
199
88
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Design for a Fan: The Pea Stakers, 1890
Gouache over black chalk on coarse brown paper
40.7 x 64.1¢m
Signed and dated C. Pissarro 1890
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.310

Pissarro’s first known fan dates from 1878. In the following year he showed
a large group of 12 fans at the fourth Impressionist Exhibition. He may have
been encouraged to make fans by Degas, and must surely have seen in the
contemporary vogue for Japanese fans a means of relieving his perpetual
indigence. He executed another sizeable group in 1890, and on 30 November
that year sent five to the dealer Cluzel, asking 200 francs for each. In the
event only three were accepted.
Pissarro made one final fan, for his son Lucien, in 1890. The work was
ready by 19 December. It is unique in shape, with sloping edges and a much
larger surface. Its composition fits into the shape with unusual success. The
scene depicts peasant women planting the sticks on which the pea plants
will climb. The apple trees are in blossom and the mood is one of idyllic
happiness. Here the women are engaged not in a laborious task, but in a
rhythmic dance in Arcadia.
Unlike most of his fans, which are painted in bodycolour, Pissarro has
here used tempera. This offered a much drier medium made up of powdered
colours which, as he noted in a letter to Esther Pissarro of 7 November 18809,
sometimes gave the appearance of pastel. Pissarro’s technique also varied
here, employing broad strokes for the leafy foreground but very narrow
lines for the women’s skirts. In doing so he created a range and precision of
texture impossible with bodycolour.

200
201
389
GEORGES SEURAT (1859-91)
The Channel at Gravelines, Evening, 1890
Oil on canvas
65.4 x 81.9 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Mr and Mrs William A. Burden, 785.1963

Seurat spent the last summer of his life at Gravelines, on the north coast
of France, not far from Dunkerque. Its flat, unrelieved landscape is very
different from the Normandy coast of some earlier seaside views, in which
the features have more in common with his friend Signac’s pictures from
Portrieux, made in the same year.
At the beginning of his career Seurat had spent a number of years
working as a pupil of Henri Lehmann, himself a pupil of Ingres (the studio
where Pissarro had once spent a very short spell). Seurat had absorbed
all that he could learn at that stage, making repeated copies after Ingres
and establishing a habit of drawing in which he developed a masterly and
original style.
Seurat also took an interest in nineteenth-century theoretical writings on
colour, in particular ideas proposed by the painter Humbert de Superville.
These related to the effect of lines of direction within a picture: for example,
the horizontal indicating balance, calmness, order, clarity and light. The
Channel at Gravelines, with its repeated horizontals, could be taken as an
application of this proposition. The placing of the anchors on the right and
the gaslight on the far left of the foreground may correspond to a theory of
proportion; it offers a point of repose from which to look. But the mystery
of the picture, alternating as it seems to do between flatness and depth,
is the result of Seurat’s own unobtrusive mastery of his ‘dot’ technique, a
method that he preferred to call ‘divisionism’. He also maintained that he had
first realised its possibilities from looking at the brush strokes in Pissarro’s
paintings in gouache.

202
 203
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 90
CAMILLE PISSARRO
A Ploughed Field, Eragny-sur-Epte, c.1886—90
Watercolour over pencil
20.9 x 27.6cm
Signed C. Pissarro, numbered by the artist No.14
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1945.125

The ground is a sea of blue, a little green and some brown, ebbing and flowing,
merging and separating. Marvellously controlled, it is matched by an equally
masterly but delicate suggestion of the fields beyond, leading the eye in other
directions to borders of trees and onwards to the sky. The successive bands of
the main structure are echoed in subtle gradations until out of sight. Brettell
and Lloyd note that compositionally and technically this drawing is related to
Pissarro’s other Neo-Impressionist landscapes of the late 1880s.

204
205
 Ol
CAMILLE PISSARRO
White Frost, 1890
Watercolour over pencil on off-white paper
20.8 x 26.2 cm
Signed, inscribed and dated Gelee blanche 19 Dec. 90 C. Pissarro
Numbered No.1
Ashmolean Museum, bequeathed by Frank Hindley Smith, 1939, WA1940.1.41

Pissarro made numerous watercolours in 1890, all of which share an interest in

observing familiar motifs in different seasons. The view is taken from the artist’s
house at Eragny looking across the meadows towards the village of Bazincourt,
a composition that Pissarro frequently repeated in the 1890s. During this period
he showed a renewed interest in climatic phenomena such as fog, hoar frost,
mist and the different effects of the sun, much as he had done in the early 1870s
when working with Monet at Loveciennes. Indeed, he consistently maintained
that winter was a more colourful time of year than summer.

206
207
 Q2
CAMILLE PISSARRO

The Eragny Shepherdess, 1890

Tempera and pastel with traces of watercolour and pencil on grey paper
Ad x 53.1 Cm
Signed and dated C. Pissarro 1890
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.311

Two signatures, and the extent of mixed media in this work, have led Brettell
and Lloyd to believe that the drawing may have been reworked by Pissarro.
Here it appears to be sunset: the shepherdess, drawn with marked contours, as
if for engraving, is still and contemplative. The subject may recall Millet, whose
drawings Pissarro greatly admired, but this shepherdess has her own reality,
without the element of archetype or fable that Millet’s figures often evoke.
A painted version of this subject two years later than this drawing of 1890,
also exists.

208
209
93
GEORGES SEURAT (1859-1891)
The Miller, c.1882
Black conté crayon
31.4 x 23.7cm
Trustees of the British Museum, 1927,0709.150. Presented by the Art Fund, 1927

94
GEORGES SEURAT (1859-1891)
A Man Gleaning, c.1883
Black conté crayon over touches of graphite
31.4 x 23.7cm
Trustees of the British Museum, 1949,0411.83. Bequeathed by Campbell Dodgson, 1949

As a student Seurat had worked with Henri Lehmann, a pupil of Ingres.

During that period he made a number of studies after early Italian artists,
as well as Holbein, Poussin and finally Ingres, whom he copied most of all.
From him Seurat retained a sense of expressive form, while moving away
from linear perfection to develop a style based on the interplay of light and
dark. The focus is evident in these two drawings, where the subjects appear
out of dusk in a halo of light.
Seurat’s subjects were working people, of both country and town. The
Miller is one of three studies he made of a market porter. He acknowledged
a debt to his friend Pissarro, specifically the densely worked surfaces of his
rural scenes, perhaps the model for the lower section of A Man Gleaning, in
which vegetation merges into an intense network of criss-crossing. Like
Pissarro, Seurat also learned from Millet, especially from his twilight scenes,
worked in black crayon on textured paper. In these he produced, almost as
if by accident, effects of white gleaming from within darkness. Variations of
such effects, some scholars have observed, may have helped Seurat to evolve
the practice of the dot technique.
The drawings of this period are not related to any finished picture.
They were valued by Seurat in their own right and he sent them to several
exhibitions, including the official Paris Salon. The distinctive character
of these works may derive, as some have suggested, both from popular
broadsides and from early Italian art (Seurat knew well the copies of Piero
della Francesca at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts). A curious duality, this was to
form the core of much of his later work.

Opposite: detail of cat. 89

211
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Last Years

Having definitively abandoned the ‘dot’ technique in 1890, Pissarro

began to enjoy commercial success. He painted in a much freer and
more painterly style. Following Monet’s example, he also began to
paint in series, notably townscapes in Paris and harbour scenes in
Rouen, Le Havre and Dieppe. A recurring eye infection encouraged
him to paint indoors, looking through the windows of rented
apartments and hotel rooms.
The acquisition of a printing press in 1894 stimulated Pissarro to
make both lithographs and etchings, the latter occasionally printed
from several plates in colour. The subjects were similar to those of
his paintings, with a new emphasis on the nude. He also collaborated
with Lucien, who had settled in London in 1890, on several series of
colour prints: Camille provided the designs for Lucien to engrave on
wood. Their letters offer a unique perspective on Pissarro’s aims and
techniques in painting and printmaking.

Opposite: detail of cat. 106

215
 DS
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Mother Nursing her Child, 1882
Drypoint and aquatint on laid paper
14.1 x 10 cm (plate); 14.9 x 19 cm (sheet)
Inscr. in ink No 1 4e etat/ mére et enfant/ aquatinte sur cuivre and signed C. Pissarro
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.541

This intimate domestic scene shows Julie Pissarro suckling her sixth
child, Jeanne, known as Cocotte (1881-1948). As usual Pissarro laid out the
composition in aquatint and drypoint. In the two following states he altered
the background from a large bed against a decorative wallpaper to an open
window, revealing beneath it a trapezoid area of light. The placing of the
figures, and the abrupt cutting of the chair in the foreground, demonstrate
Pissarro’s interest in Japanese woodcuts. Lifetime impressions of this print
are very rare.

216
217
 96
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Church and Farm at Eragny-sur-Epte, 1894-5
Etching, drypoint, metal brush and burnisher on paper
15.5 x 24.2 cm (plate); 24.8 x 31.4 cm (sheet)
Inscribed in pencil se etat no 1 /La ferme d’Eragny /Eglise et ferme d’Eragny, signed C. Pissarro
and inscr. imp par C.P.
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.615

oF.
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Church and Farm at Eragny-sur-Epte, 1894-5
Colour etching with drypoint, metal brush and burnisher; printed in blue,
yellow, red and black ink on laid paper
15.7 x 24.8 cm (plate); 26.7 x 39.5 cm (sheet)
Stamped C.P. (L. 613e) and inscr. in pencil no II/II
Ashmolean Museum, presented by Miss Orovida Pissarro, 1953, WA1953.85

218
In 1894 Pissarro acquired a printing press in his house at Eragny, stimulating
him to make a number of experimental etchings. In particular, he devised his
own method of making etchings in colour. Although Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro
argued that the monochrome version of this print was made in 1890, it is
now generally agreed to have been made several years later. Certainly this
impression, printed by Pissarro himself, would have been made on his
own press. The view of the church and manor at Eragny was taken up ina
painting of 1895 (Paris, Musée d’Orsay).
The impression of the final state, printed in colour, was probably
based on one printed in black and coloured with pastel (Art Institute of
Chicago). Pissarro has had difficulty in registering the four plates correctly.
Nonetheless, the overlaid black, red, yellow and blue plates render the effect
of the shimmering sunset glow.

Cat. 97

219
 98
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Gisors Market (rue Cappeville), 1894
Etching and drypoint, coloured with blue, brown, red
and olive crayon
28 x 20.6cm
Inscr. No 8 état No1/ colonié au crayon de coleur /accompagner les traits en général
Ashmolean Museum, presented by Miss Orovida Pissarro, 1953, WA1953.88.1

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220
29
CAMILLE PISSARRO

Gisors Market (rue Cappeville), 1894

Etching, drypoint and burnisher, printed in blue, brown, red
and green ink on wove paper
26.9 x 19.8 cm
Inscr. No 2 Ep d’artiste // Marché a Gisors rue Cappeville and signed C. Pissarro
Ashmolean Museum, presented by Miss Orovida Pissarro, 1953, WA1953.88.2

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221
 100
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Market Scene: compositional study for the ‘Gisors Market (rue Cappeville)’, 1893
Black crayon with pen and black ink, grey wash and white bodycolour
on tracing paper, laid down on stiff white paper
31.9 x 22.5 cm (sheet)
Ashmolean Museum, WA1989.120

SUPPL
The Gisors Market was originally intended to form one of the plates in the
second album of Travaux des champs. In his correspondence, Pissarro gives a
detailed account of the progress of the subject. He began work on the design
in October 1893, but for a long time remained undecided as to whether the
composition should be vertical or horizontal. He made drawings of both
alternatives, to weigh up the conflicting desires of being able to develop the
perspective of the rue Cappeville in the background, against having many
figures in the foreground. By 23 October Pissarro had finished the horizontal
composition and promised to send Lucien a tracing. Two days later, however,
he had changed his mind, deciding definitively that this version did not give
enough space in the background. He then began the vertical composition.
On 28 October he told Georges Manzana-Pissarro that he had sent a
tracing of the Market ‘en hauteur’ to Lucien, and this may be identified fairly
certainly with the present drawing. A few days later, on 2 November, Pissarro
announced that he had ‘completed the woodblock’ and sent it to Lucien. It
remains uncut.
The scene shows a tall man on the right, hands in pockets, looking at
a seated woman selling fruit; a peasant woman in the middle of the street,
wearing a scarf and with her hands deep in the pockets of her apron, waits
while a seller weighs or wraps her purchases; between them a woman
chatters volubly, throwing up her hands for emphasis. Behind them the
crowded street bustles with activity. Despite its status as a preparatory
drawing for a woodblock, and the thick outlines inherent in a tracing, this
work conveys much of the excitement Pissarro found on market days at
Pontoise and Gisors. Both Camille and Lucien realised that the design was
too complicated for the medium of woodcut. Camille then resumed the
composition, probably using some of the same tracings, as a colour etching,
beginning on 26 May and finishing on 14 December 1894.
Pissarro took proofs of at least four states in black ink before he began
experimenting with colours. Cat. 98 is coloured with four different colours
of crayon. It is extensively inscribed with his observations, including that
the dark areas are too dark or the man’s beard needs to be reworked. Nine
impressions of the final state were printed in colour from four plates. The pin
holes at the top and bottom denote the registration points. Each impression
is slightly different because, as Camille wrote to Lucien: ‘it is very difficult to
find the right colours’. Together the three impressions represent the summit
of Pissarro’s search for different sensations in colour prints.

223
 101
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Nude Woman bending, 1893-4
Charcoal on paper
28.8 x 22.3. cm
Stamped C.P. (L. 613a)
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.358

Wabuitg or

224
102
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Two Female Bathers in a Wooded Landscape, 1893—4
Pen and ink with grey wash over pencil on laid paper
19.2 x 14cm
Stamped C.P. (L. 613a)
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.412

225
 103
CAMILLE PISSARRO
The Two Bathers, 1895
Soft-ground etching, drypoint, metal brush and open bite,
printed on Japanese paper
18 x 12.7 cm (plate); 20.2 x 15.3 cm (sheet)
Inscribed in pencil ze [over 4] Etat les deux baigneuses and inscr. in blue pencil
2e et and signed C.P.
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.639

rd a Ve
ey Be oF dS Ley Herne ay Reh th,

vee) eS

226
After watching some peasant women bathing in the river Epte at Eragny,
Pissarro noted in a letter of 3 July 1893 that the ‘tropical heat invites one to
make compositions full of shadows on the river banks’. Over the next two
years he developed this initial thought in a series of works in various media,
inspired by the bathers he had seen.
Pissarro had very decided ideas about the nude, as his letters to his
children reveal. In 1894 he instructed Georges to avoid drawing the nude
in the abstract, idealised manner of the Académie: he should instead treat
it as realistically as he would anything else — ‘just as you would make
chickens, ducks, geese, etc’. His own nudes are rare, in part because, as he
often complained, it was difficult to find models. This charcoal drawing
(cat. 101) was used for several different compositions. It is firmly drawn and
was clearly intended to be used in a composition of bathers, since the feet
are submerged by imaginary water and therefore not drawn. Pissarro has
had some difficulty with the foreshortening (although he had already used
similar poses for clothed peasant women) and with the anatomy: this buxom
woman has unusually thin arms.
This nude study is directly incorporated into the composition of two
women bathing under shady trees, itself a preliminary study for two etchings
made in January 1894: The Two Bathers and The Three Bathers. In the drawing,
thick outlines of ink have been added over pencil under-drawing, and areas
of shadow applied with the brush. The two women were probably drawn
from the same model, but the bather in the foreground has again caused
difficulties — her arms are still too thin, her hands too large and her shoulders
boneless. Nevertheless, Pissarro wrote to Lucien on 21 January 1894 that ‘they
are perhaps too natural, peasant women made of firm flesh! I’m afraid that
delicate sensibilities will find them offensive, but I think they are the best
things I’ve done’.
The etching is in the complicated mixed technique that Pissarro favoured
in the mid-189o0s. It required multiple different proof states before it reached
this fourth state — the contours of the bodies gradually becoming more fully
defined, while the landscape remained largely the same.

227
104
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Pontoise Market, 1895
Lithograph on zinc
30.1 x 22.4 cm (image); 44.4 x 31.2 cm (sheet)
Signed in the stone C.P.
Inscribed in pencil Ep. definitive no 10 /Marché a Pontoise (S/ pierre) and signed C. Pissarro
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.662

Pissarro’s acquisition of his own press in 1894 led to a remarkable increase

in his output as a printmaker, both in etchings and in lithographs. In both
he continued to explore the motifs he was also painting, including bathers
and views of Rouen and Paris, as well as the traditional rural subjects of
farmers at work and in the marketplace. This imposing lithograph resumes
the composition of an oil painting of the same year (Kansas, Nelson-Atkins
Museum). Pissarro described his work on the print in a letter to Lucien of
8 April 1895:

Iam working on a large lithograph on stone, a Market. 1am working

on it here in Paris. I have fiddled about with wash, scratched it,
rubbed it with emery paper; I don’t know what it will be like, but
I was silly to make a Market; I should have made some Bathers.

In the same letter Pissarro also reported that he was planning a series
of lithographs, but on zinc rather than stone because it was more
manageable. In fact this Pontoise Market was almost the last to be made on
stone, and also the largest.

228
229
105
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Women Carrying Firewood, c.1896
Transfer lithograph on zinc, printed on blue Ingres paper appliqué
20.8 x 28.4cm
Signed in the stone Pissarro; stamped C.P. (L.613e)
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.665

On 25 March 1896 the anarchist writer Jean Grave wrote to tell Pissarro of his
intention to ask artists sympathetic to the movement to supply one or two
drawings for an album of about 30 plates, to be sold to encourage workers to
appreciate art, and to support his journal Les Temps nouveaux. Every care was
to be taken with the design and printing of the limited edition, which would
necessarily be expensive. Pissarro and his sons Lucien and Georges had
already contributed works for the tombolas held to raise funds in aid of the
magazine. Eventually, Pissarro provided Grave with three lithographs: two in
1896 and the last published in 1901; Lucien made one.
Women carrying Firewood repeats a composition that Pissarro had originally
intended to use in the second phase of the Travaux des champs, known from the
finished drawing he prepared. Like its companion lithograph The Homeless,
it shows a new consciousness in Pissarro’s art of the hardships of life in
the countryside. The joyful idylls of gathering apples or planting peasticks
have been replaced by dark images of poverty and suffering, reflecting the
protracted crisis in farming in the 1890s. Pissarro developed the subject from
a lightly drawn transfer lithograph, which has little of the emotional power
of the final work.

230
eee
——=)

231
 106
CAMILLE PISSARRO
The Sower, 1896
Lithograph on paper
Sheet 29.3 x 38.7 cm
Signed in the stone C. Pissarro and inscr. in pencil Epreuve d’essai; stamped C.P. (L.613e)
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.668

The Sower first appeared in a painting of 1875 made at Montfoucault, and was
one of the subjects considered for the Travaux des champs, although Lucien’s
wood engraving of his father’s design was eventually published on the cover
of the catalogue of an exhibition of Pissarro’s work at Boussod Valadon
in February 1890. The lithograph, which resumes the composition of an
earlier drawing, may have been intended for Les Temps nouveaux. Certainly,
the composition of the earlier painting was reproduced on the cover of
Pierre Kropotkine’s lecture Les Temps nouveaux, published in 1898. While it
is obviously indebted to Millet’s many representations of the same subject,
notably the lithograph of 1851, the posture of the sower conveys slow
drudgery rather than lively movement.

232
 ore
5twy§, diet eee
107
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Compositional Study for ‘Women Weeding the Grass’, 1894
Pen and indian ink with watercolour over charcoal
17.8 x 12 cm (image); 23.2 x 15 cm (sheet)
Stamped L. 613e
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.4.43

The Travaux des champs was to have been a book illustrated with wood
engravings by Lucien after drawings by his father Pissarro, showing the
different activities in the countryside in each month of the year. However, in
common with all Lucien’s early projects, it failed to find a publisher. Lucien
continued to work on it after his move to England in 1890, but was persuaded
by Charles Ricketts of the Vale Press that it would be preferable to publish
the illustrations as a portfolio, in a similar way to Lucien’s First Portfolio (1893).
The six prints for the Travaux des champs were completed in 1894 and issued in
the following year. This was intended to be the first of three portfolios, but
the other two were never published.
The Women Weeding the Grass takes up the theme of two earlier paintings
(cf. cat. 55) and is one of the most successful prints of the series. It was made
from a line block and five colour blocks. Pissarro’s drawing was transferred
by photography to the block, on which Lucien cut the outline. This
impression of the outline block has been coloured by Pissarro with extensive
instructions about the colours. He also suggested that the lighting should
be changed from daylight to sunset, notably that the scene should have
the ‘intense effect of the sun setting with strong shadows and lively, orange
light’. The print reflects Pissarro’s advice to ‘return to the manner of your old
blocks, crudely cut, but thick and firm, with a high feeling for colour, without
seeking sophistication alien to the subject’.

234
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235
 108
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Women Weeding the Grass, 1894
Wood engraving printed in colour from six blocks on wove paper
18.0 x 11.9 cm (image), 35.1 x 26.2 cm (sheet)
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA.PA.77.2202

236
109
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Women Weeding the Grass, 1894
Wood engraving coloured with watercolour
7-5 x 11.8 cm (image); 21.2 x 17.8 cm (sheet)
Extensively inscribed with instructions from Camille
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.446

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237
110
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Study for ‘The Temple ofthe Golden Calf’, 1889
Pen and dark ink over pencil on glazed paper
22.5 x 18cm
Inscr. No. 12. La Bounse
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.296

Les Turpitudes sociales is an album of 28 finished drawings in pen and ink

that Pissarro sent to his cousins Esther and Alice Isaacson in England on
29 December 1889 as a New Year gift. It was intended that there should be a
text by Pissarro’s anarchist friend Jean Grave, and that the whole enterprise
would reveal ‘the most shameful ignominies of the bourgeoisie’. The
narrative sequence of the drawings describes the pursuit of wealth and the
worship of money, the effects on the lives of those exploited by capitalists
and the possible results — insurrection or suicide. It was inspired by articles
published in La Révolte. Lucien designed the binding and cover illustrations.
In the letter to the Isaacson sisters accompanying the drawings, Pissarro
gave his own views on what each drawing represented. The third drawing,
Le Temple du veau d'or or La Bourse, he describes as follows:

In the foreground are faces worthy of Dante’s Inferno, busy noting the
fluctuations in share prices. These are our masters! Can you see them
climbing the steps, running after fortune or bankruptcy, fat ones, thin
ones. I should have drawn them inside the Bourse, where they scream
like savages, but that will be for another album. These monsters are
well worth a place in the collection.

The style of the drawings is somewhat influenced by the work of Gustave

Doré, the most popular illustrator in France and England, but more
particularly by Charles Keene, whose work in Punch Pissarro greatly admired.
The pen-work is rapid and agitated, with a virtuosic-variety of cross-hatching
over pencil underdrawing. There are considerable differences between this
preparatory study and the drawing in the album — notably in the disposition
of the figures and the steepness of the steps up to the stock exchange.

238
i
WARE

239
 111
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Study of a Market, 1900-1
Grey wash with Chinese white heightened with pure Chinese white;
partly redrawn in pencil on paper prepared with a grey-green wash
11.1 x 9.2 cm (image); 15.8 x 11.3 cm (sheet)
Inscribed in ink on the verso 3¢ category 3e division /No. 2 marché aux legumes
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.489

240
 112
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Study ofa Sower in a Field, 1900-1
Grey wash over black chalk on paper
11.1 x 9.0 cm (image); 13.0 x 10.3 cm (sheet)
Stamped C.P. (L. 613e)
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.477

‘
Te
ee
a
a

i
:

241
113
Emile Moselly, La Charrue d’Erable
Paris Le Livre Contemporain, 1913
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA.PA.77.4016

Shortly before the publication of the album Travaux des champs, Pissarro wrote
to Lucien that, in his opinion, a book illustrated with wood engravings would
have a better chance of success than a second portfolio of loose engravings.
While he was making the drawings for Daphnis and Chloe, he was at the
same time making drawings for a new series of engravings on the theme
of the Travaux des champs, in a similar style. He planned twelve drawings, of
which he completed seven; none was engraved. By April 1900 Camille and
Lucien were planning a new project to illustrate the theme; they were also
corresponding with Benjamin Guinaudeau who was to provide the text.
Their aim was to illustrate the activities of peasants in three categories: in the
fields, at home, and in social activities (in the markets or at leisure).
In December of that year Camille sent to Lucien in London six drawings
in a new format, intending that Lucien should engrave them in the
chiaroscuro manner that he had so admired in Italian prints in the British
Museum; he later sent six further drawings. The correspondence between
the pair shows that Camille was increasingly frustrated with Lucien’s lack
of progress in agreeing with Guinaudeau the extent and nature of the text.
Although Lucien seems to have made several chiaroscuro wood engravings
during his father’s lifetime, it was not until the year after Camille’s death
that he revived the idea of illustrating the Travaux des champs. After several
aborted attempts Lucien turned in 1909 to the society of bibliophiles, the
Livre contemporain, to publish a biography of his father illustrated with the
drawings he had made. Eventually Emile Moselly agreed to provide 12 short
chapters on a rural theme to match the subjects chosen by Camille. Progress
was slow, but the book was finally published as La Charrue d’erable (The Maple-
Wood Plough) in March 1913.

242
243
 114
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Compositional Study for ‘Chloe washing Daphnis at a Stream’, 1899
Pen and indian ink over pencil with Chinese white on tracing paper
12.1 x 3.6 cm (image); 17.4 x 19.1 cm (sheet)
Signed C.P.
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.434

244
115
LUCIEN PISSARRO (1863-1944)
Chloe washing Daphnis at a Stream, 1899
Wood engraving on proof paper
12.7 x 14.1 cm (image); 18.4 x 20.4 cm (sheet)
Signed in block CP
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA.PA.77.4233

245
 116
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Compositional Study for ‘Grape Harvest’, 1899
Pen and indian ink over pencil with Chinese white on tracing paper laid down on card
12.4 x 13.9 cm (image); 13.5 x 14.6 cm (sheet)
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA1952.6.435

117
LUCIEN PISSARRO (1863-1944)
Grape Harvest, 1899
Wood engraving on brown paper
12.8 x14cm
Ashmolean Museum, presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952, WA.PA.77.4232

Cat. 116

246
In January 1895 Lucien wrote to Pissarro suggesting that he might like to make
12 small drawings to illustrate the story of Daphnis and Chloe. ‘I am sure that the
subject will suit you very well. I can already see your compositions with sheep
and goats and bathers,’ he observed. Partly as a reaction to the edition published
by Charles Rickett and Charles Shannon at the Vale Press in 1893, Lucien
imagined a thoroughly modern illustration, with peasants rather than classical
models.
Pissarro agreed and completed highly finished compositional drawings for five
subjects, of which only two were engraved on wood by Lucien; the others were
Daphnis meeting Chloe in the Snow, the Feast of Dionysophanes at Mytilene and
the Nuptials of Daphnis and Chloe. However, Lucien felt that the illustrations
were too dark to accompany type. At this date he was also obliged to borrow
type from Ricketts and Shannon, which proved impractical. Pissarro himself
expressed doubts about the style of the drawing, finding it rather monotonous,
and by February 1896 the project had been abandoned. It was revived in 1899,
when Lucien printed from the two blocks he had engraved earlier, but neither
artist was satisfied with the results. It is clear that Lucien had originally intended
the illustration to be set in elaborate borders, as he was later to do with many of
the books published by the Eragny Press.

Gate7

247
118
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Pont Boieldieu, Rouen, Sunset, 1896
Oil on canvas
74.2 x 92.5 cm
Signed and dated C. Pissarro. 1896
Birmingham Museum Trust on behalf of Birmingham City Council, 1950P23

Pissarro visited Rouen, the capital of Upper Normandy, in 1883. He spent

two months in the autumn painting views of the port and told Lucien that in
its way it was ‘as beautiful as Venice’. He returned in January 1896, intending
to paint ‘at least eight or ten’ large canvases, along with 15 or 20 smaller,
in preparation for an exhibition at Durand-Ruel’s gallery, due to open in
April. By the time he returned to Eragny in late March he had completed
15 paintings. All were made looking out of the window of his room in the
hotel de Paris, where he ‘shivered, the rooms being so draughty, the wind
blows from all sides’. Pissarro worked on several canvases at a time, in order
to have enough time to capture the passing effects of traffic and weather.
The idea of painting in series had been inspired by the exhibition of Monet's
Grainstacks in 1891, but was also born out of physical necessity: he was
suffering from an infection of the lachrymal duct and had been advised by
his doctor to avoid draughts.
The pont Boieldieu, named after the composer, was an iron bridge of
three spans, built on stone piers. It was inaugurated in 1888 and destroyed in
1940. Pissarro was fascinated by the structure; he wrote to Lucien:

I have some effects of fog, mist, rain, a sunset, some overcast skies,
some bridge motifs painted from various angles, some quays with
boats, but the one I’m most interested in is a motif of an iron bridge
in rainy weather with a great commotion of carriages, strollers,
stevedores, boats, smoke, haze in the distance, full of life and
movement.

This is one of two sunset views of the bridge painted by Pissarro. The other
focuses on the central pier rather than the general structure of the bridge.

248
249
119
CAMILLE PISSARRO
The Tuileries Gardens in the Rain, 1899
Oil on canvas
65x 92cm
Signed and dated C. Pissarro, 99
Ashmolean Museum, bequeathed by Mrs W.F.R. Weldon, 1937, WA1937.73

In December 1898, deciding to leave Eragny for the winter, Pissarro found a
flat for himself and his family in Paris at 204 rue de Rivoli. It offered a superb
view of the Tuileries Gardens and of the city around, ‘the Louvre to the left,
the dome of the Invalides to the right, the quays and even the spires of Sainte
Clotilde, visible behind the chestnut trees’.
The view that Pissarro so admired was from an upper window, of
course. By the time the family moved in it was January, the time of year
when Pissarro found more colour, pale yet brilliant, than in bright sunlight.
Confined to the flat, he planned a series of pictures which he hoped to be able
to sell to Paul Durand-Ruel. Pissarro found enough variety in the weather,
much of it wet and misty, and the gradual changes of season. Sometimes he
took his view from a different window in the flat. By March he had already
painted 12 of his planned series of 14. By May, Durand-Ruel had chosen 11.
This scene is probably one of the earliest, a rainy day with few people
about. This allowed Pissarro to explore the character of the garden itself, a
seventeenth-century design: balanced and symmetrical, yet revealing a range
of directions in which the viewer might wander. He found in it scope for the
understated colour contrasts he had always liked: the green of the grass and
the light, pinkish brown of the path, complemented by blue reflections in the
puddles. The Tuileries Gardens in the Rain is a landscape within the city where,
as Pissarro once wrote to Lucien, he found such beauty in the light.

250
251
120
CAMILLE PISSARRO
Self-Portrait, 1903
Oil on canvas
41 x 33cm
Signed and dated Pissarro. 1903
Tate, presented by Lucien Pissarro, 1931, No4592

Pissarro spent the winter of 1902-3 in his apartment at 28 place Dauphine,

as he had in the two preceding years. Initially he was worried about
painting the same motifs over again, but he succeeded in completing 13
views from his window — along with a further series showing the pont
Royal and the pont du Carrousel from the window of a hotel room on the
quai Voltaire — in spring 1903. For some time Pissarro had been feeling old
and physically infirm. Just after his 73rd birthday, on 10 July 1903, he wrote
to his children:

I shall do my utmost to follow my destiny by working as hard as

possible, because the thread that is keeping me here on earth is very
near to unravelling completely.

This final self-portrait is, like the first of 1873, carefully composed, the
artist presenting himself in dark overcoat and hat against the brighter
background of the Samaritaine buildings. The brushwork is light and the
paint surface relatively thin, suggesting that the work was completed with
some haste.

252
Selected Reading

Richard Brettell and Christopher Lloyd, A Catalogue ofthe Drawings by Camille

Pissarro in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Oxford, 1980.
Richard R. Brettell, Pissarro and Pontoise: The Painter in a Landscape, New Haven
and London, 1990
Richard Brettell (ed.), Pissarro’s People (exh. cat.), Sterling and Francine Clark
Art Institute, Williamstown; California Palace of the Legion of Honor,
San Francisco, 2011
Richard Brettell (ed.), Pissarro 4 Eragny: La nature retrouvée (exh. cat.), Musée
Luxembourg Sénat, Paris, 2017
Frangoise Cachin, Anne Distel, Christopher Lloyd, Barbara Stern Shapiro and
John Walsh (eds), Camille Pissarro 1830-1903 (exh. cat.), Hayward Gallery,
London; Grand Palais, Paris; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1980-81
Loys Delteil, Le Peintre-graveur illustré, vol. xvii, Camille Pissarro; Alfred Sisley;
Auguste Renoir, Paris, 1923.
Christophe Duvivier and Josef Helfenstein (eds), Camille Pissarro: The Studio of
Modernism (exh. cat.), Kunstmuseum Basel, 2021
Annette Haudiquet (ed.), Pissarro dans les ports: Rouen, Dieppe, Le Havre (exh. cat.),
Musée d’art modern André Malraux, Le Havre, 2013
Janine Bailly-Herzberg (ed.), Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, 5 vols, Paris,
1980-91.
Christopher Lloyd (ed.), Studies on Camille Pissarro, London and New York, 1986.
Nicole Minder (ed.), Degas & Pissarro: Alchimie d’une rencontre (exh. cat), Musée
Jenisch, Vevey, 1998
Joachim Pissarro, Camille Pissarro, New York, 1993
Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro: Critical Catalogue
ofPaintings, 3 vols, Paris and Milan, 2005
Joachim Pissarro (ed.), Cézanne and Pissarro: Pioneering Modern Painting 1865-1885
(exh. cat), Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County
Museum of Art; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 2005-6
Ludovic Rodo Pissarro and Lionello Venturi, Camille Pissarro: Son art, son oeuvre,
2 vols, Paris, 1936.
John Rewald (ed.) with the assistance of Lucien Pissarro, Camille Pissarro: Letters
to his Son, Lucien, London, 1943; revised and expanded edn London and
Henley, 1972; fourth edn 1980.
Anne Thorold (ed.), The Letters ofLucien to Camille Pissarro, 1883-1903,
Cambridge, 1993.

Opposite: detail of cat. 81

255
 Image Credits

Fig. 1 Photo © Photo Josse /Bridgeman Images Cat. 20 © Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. Biihler
Fig. 4 Photo © Photo Josse /Bridgeman Images Cat. 21 Musées de Pontoise
Fig. 5 Southampton City Art Gallery, Hampshire, UK / Cat. OD, © Musée Camille Pissarro, Pontoise
Bridgeman Images Cat. 32 © Musée Camille Pissarro, Pontoise
Fig. 8 Bridgeman Images Cat. 33 © Kunstmuseum Basel, Collection L. & S. Pissarro
Fig. 9 © National Galleries of Scotland /Bridgeman Images Cat. 34 ©Musée Camille Pissarro, Pontoise
_ Fig.10 © National Galleries of Scotland /Bridgeman Images Cat. 37 © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved
Fig. 11 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Cat. 38 © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved
William Church Osborn, 1951. www.metmuseum.org Cat. 52 © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) |Hervé Lewandowski
Fig. 12 Bridgeman Images Cat. 53 Private Collection
Fig. 13 The Walters Art Museum Cat. 54 Bequeathed by Lucien Pissarro, the artist’s son 1944.
Fig. 14 © Kunstmuseum Basel, Jonas Haenggi Photo: © Tate
Fig. 15 The Art Institute of Chicago Cat. 56 Private Collection
Fig. 16 Bridgeman Images Cat. 57 Private Collection
Fig. 17 Photo © Christie’s Images /Bridgeman Images Cat. 61 © Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. Bihler
Fig. 18 Photo © Christie’s Images /Bridgeman Images Cat. 62 © Kunstmuseum Basel, Jonas Haenggi
Fig. 20 Bridgeman Images Cat. 63 © Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. Biihler
Fig. 21 © The National Gallery, London Cat. 64 © The National Gallery, London
Fig. 22 © Rudolf Staechelin Collection ats 65 Privatsammlung, Foto: Debbie Davis /Loreda
Fig. 23 Photo © Christie’s Images /Bridgeman Images Cat. 66 © Rudolf Staechelin Collection
Fig. 24 Bridgeman Images Cat. 67 © 2021. Princeton University Art Museum /Art Resource
Fig. 26 © The Trustees of the British Museum NY | Scala, Florence
Fig. 27 © The Trustees of the British Museum Cat. 68 © 2021. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art,
Fig. 28 Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection. The Art Institute New York| Scala, Florence
of Chicago Cat: 69 © Sheffield Museums Trust
Fig. 29 © The Trustees of the British Museum Cat. 7O © Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau /Legat Dr. Max Fretz
Fig. 30 Bridgeman Images Cat. Fee © Musée Camille Pissarro, Pontoise
Fig. 31 Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington Cat. 73 Private Collection
Fig. 33 Camille Pissarro, Place du Théatre Francais, Paris: Rain, 1898, Cat. 74 © Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. Biihler
Oil on canvas, 73.66 x 91.44 cm. Copyright © Minneapolis Eats 75 © Collection Jean Faure, Musée Faure, Aix les Bains,
Institute of Art, Donor The William Hood Dunwoody France — photo : F. Fouger
Fund, 18.19. Photo: Minneapolis Institute of Art Cat. 76 © Collection Jean Faure, Musée Faure, Aix les Bains,
Fig. 35 Photo © Photo Josse /Bridgeman Images France — photo : F. Fouger
Fig. 37 The Little Country Maid, 1882, Camille Pissarro, Bequeathed by Cat. Tal Private Collection, Paris
Lucien Pissarro, the artist’s son 1944. Photo © Tate Cat. 78 Private Collection
Cat. 1 © Image courtesy Dallas Museum of Art Cat. 79 Private Collection
Gate © The National Gallery, London Cat. 81 © Image courtesy Dallas Museum of Art
Cat. © Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. Biihler Cat. 83 © Kunstmuseum Basel, Collection L.&S. Pissarro
Cat. ©Musée Camille Pissarro, Pontoise Cat. 85 © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved
eS)Southampton City Art Gallery, Hampshire, UK /
Cat. aN
eo Cat. 86 ©Musée Camille Pissarro, Pontoise
Bridgeman Images Cat. 87 ©Musée Camille Pissarro, Pontoise
Cat. 8 Kunstmuseum Basel, Private Collection Cat. 89 © 2021. Digital image, The Museumof Modern Art, New
Cat. 9 © Kunstmuseum Basel, Jonas Haenggi York/Scala, Florence
Cat. 12 © Kunstmuseum Basel, Privatbesitz Cat. 93 © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved
Cat. 13 © Rudolf Staechelin Collection Cat. 94 © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved
Cat.14 © The National Gallery, London Cat. 118 Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust, licensed under CCo
Cat. 18 Musées de Pontoise Cat. 120 Presented by Lucien Pissarro, the artist’s son 1931.
Cat. 19 Musées de Pontoise Photo: © Tate

256
COLIN HARRISON is the Senior Curator of
European Art in the Department of Western
Art in the Ashmolean Museum.

Front cover:
Camille Pissarro, Design for a Fan: The Pea
Stakers, 1890

Back cover:
Camille Pissarro, Landscape near Pontoise, 1872
ee ge ae : 5: f ISBN 978-1-910807-52-1

9°781910"807521