Audio Guide for The Honest Eye: Camille Pissarro's Impressionism

CHRISTOPH HEINRICH: Hello, I'm Christoph Heinrich, Director of the Denver Art Museum. I'd like to welcome you to our special exhibition, The Honest Eye: Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism.

In this first picture, just over the hillside, lay Pontoise, the rural French village where Camille Pissarro was living when he painted this frosty landscape in 1873. Late fall or early spring doesn’t show a landscape at the height of its beauty. However, Pissarro catches a moment in the morning sun, where the deeply plowed ruts of the field are overlaid with slender shadows of an alley of tall trees, poplars quite likely, that are positioned outside of the painting. The diagonals of these shadows merge with the ruts and pathway into an expanding grid, that covers more than half of the canvas and turns the earth into a vibrating energy field.

Times were tough for the painter and he was resigned to pay his grocery bills by bartering his paintings. Nevertheless, he was about to take a risk with fellow artists Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and others by organizing the first Impressionist exhibition, which opened on April 15, 1874. The truly innovative landscape in front of you was one of five paintings, Pissarro exhibited there. Sadly, his paintings were met with mixed reviews and tepid sales that would be a harbinger of his life-long struggle for success.

But Pissarro had his admirers—his fellow artists, many of whom he mentored such as Paul Cezanne—and dear friends such as the writer Émile Zola who wrote that although other painters might be more popular, not everyone had Pissarro’s “accurate, honest eye.” “Once circumstances shine a light on him,” Zola wrote, “he will be accepted as a master.”

Camille Pissarro’s recognition would indeed finally come. Join us on an audio journey through the artist’s incredible biography, and discover Pissarro’s essential role in the radical art movement that would become known as Impressionism.

NARRATOR: Two Afro-Caribbean women meet on a path for a chat—the woman in white carrying freshly laundered linens may be done with her work, while the one in blue could be on her way to join the others washing garments in the sea. This is a scene of St. Thomas, the Danish-controlled Carribbean island of Camille Pissarro’s birth. Now part of the U.S. Virgin Islands, it was a diverse, international trading hub, initially built by chattel slavery and sugar plantations. On the island, there were many domestic enslaved persons—especially washerwomen—that labored for wealthier households, including Pissarro’s family before the abolition of slavery in 1848. Afterwards, it still remained a common occupation.

NATALIA VIEYRA: He made many images of washerwomen in St. Thomas. This subject of labor is a theme that he would return to again and again throughout his career, and it's really solidified here as one of the primary preoccupations of his work. I'm Natalia Vieyra, and I am the associate Curator of Latinx Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

NARRATOR: St. Thomas happened to be home to one of the most complex and populous Jewish communities in the Americas. Pissarro came from a family of successful merchants who traded and sold dry goods in the island's capital of Charlotte Amalie. They hoped he would help run the family business, but Pissarro wanted to be an artist, and eventually he was able to leave for Paris.

NATALIA VIEYRA: Something I think really important to understand about these early oil paintings that Pissarro did was that he painted them in Paris over 4,000 miles away...these scenes aren't painted from life. They're not painted en plein air, which would come to be one of the defining aspects of Impressionism. They're painted from his memory, and also from hundreds of sketches that he made during his youth, and he brought them with him when he embarked upon his artistic life in France. He really sought to initially market himself as a Caribbean painter and he even included his birthplace of Saint Thomas on his business cards.

NARRATOR: This gloomy, winter scene is a stark departure from Pissarro’s pastel-hued Caribbean pictures. Once he left the Americas, he never felt the need to return, nor did he mention missing the sunshine, the light, or the ocean there. Pissarro was thrilled with northern France’s soft, damp tones, and the effect of rain and wintry hues.

By 1866 when this painting was accepted to the Paris Salon—the official, government sponsored, annual juried exhibition—he had been living in France for ten years. Although he was slowly gaining more recognition, he and his partner Julie Vellay and their two small children struggled financially. Living in the countryside was more affordable than Paris, and for three years Pissarro painted in this rural region, east of the city along the looping Marne River before it merges with the Seine.

If Pissarro began this picture outdoors, he would finish it in the studio, allowing him to revisit the painting over a period of months, reworking areas, and likely adding the broad swath of green grass close to the end. Incorporating both plein air painting and studio work would become an established way of working for him throughout his career.

Years later, he would write his grown son Lucien, who also became an artist, on the virtues of both working methods:

CAMILLE PISSARRO:

“I am overjoyed to hear you are beginning a painting in your studio. It is by working in the smithy that one becomes a blacksmith… it is just as difficult as work outdoors, but it is entirely different…You should not seek in the studio what cannot be found there, just as outdoors you should strive only for direct and spontaneous sensations.”

NARRATOR: The Pissarros moved to the village of Pontoise in late 1866. Paris was only a little more than an hour away by train, now that the railway bridge that spanned the Oise River had been completed. Pissarro was still struggling to sell his works and had to take on odd jobs, including painting store blinds and shop signs.

GENEVIEVE WESTERBY: It's a transitional period for Pissarro, I would say. He's starting to move away from the richer tones that might be associated with the Barbizon, and is shifting to the brighter and higher key palette that the Impressionists are more known for. And you see that in the greenery that's just above the stone bridge, and the super bright blue sky. I’m Genevieve Westerby, scholar of Impressionism.

NARRATOR: Pissarro was also interested in capturing the landscape around him as he saw it—including its radical changes as industry transformed the suburbs.

GENEVIEVE WESTERBY: We don't know much about Pissarro's feelings about industrial progress. There's nothing in his letters about whether he saw it as simply a benefit to society, or as causing harm to the environment.  We know at least that he was interested in and supported thinkers on both sides of the debate. When we're looking at the Quai du Pothuis, we can certainly tell that he was interested in industrial progress and modernization as a subject. Pissarro includes evidence of the new gas factory. The tall slender smokestack rises far above the trees around it, dark gray puffs of smoke are wafting out of it and into the bright blue sky. And actually, we can see the same factory again from a slightly different angle in his Banks of the Oise.

NARRATOR: In the spring of 1869, the Pissarro family moved again, this time to Louveciennes, a village northwest of Paris. For this painting, the artist set up his easel on the wet, paved Route de Versailles, a major thoroughfare that his friend and frequent houseguest Claude Monet painted twice in 1870. The painting reflects Pissarro’s new interest in observing seasonal effects on the same view.

In July, the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and Paris went under siege.  The Pissarro family left quickly, leaving most of their belongings behind at the advance of the Prussian Army who would garrison in Louveciennes. Eventually they fled to London for safety.

While in England, Pissarro met his future art dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, and he and Julie finally married in a small civil ceremony. When the war ended in the spring, Pissarro returned to Louveciennes to discover that his studio was destroyed and three quarters of his belongings were lost. Only a few paintings were spared, having been kept safe by their neighbors.

Pissarro summarized the situation in a letter to his landlord, who was demanding rent:

CAMILLE PISSARRO: “I had twelve to fifteen hundred paintings, studies, and sketches, work from twenty years of my life. I think that if any property is sacred, it’s property that is the product of our intelligence, and made with our own hands. I now just have a broken bed, no mattress…no cookware…and so many little things that make up a household, my books, the tools of a painter’s craft…It’s pitiful.”

NARRATOR: Pissarro, however, wasted no time wallowing in his circumstances. He felt that everything—sadness, bitterness, and sorrow—was erased by the sheer joy of getting back to work.

NARRATOR: Despite her central role in Camille’s life, Julie Pissarro rarely appeared as a portrait model, though she is often found as a figure in his landscape paintings. Here she is shown fully immersed in her sewing, a testament to her dedication to her household and its tasks, which she rarely paused, even to sit for a portrait by her husband.

Although not directly involved in Camille’s artistic business, Julie visited his exhibitions, and expressed her opinion about his work. Camille respected her judgements. Even if he did not always accept her criticisms, he wanted to know what she thought. Julie was also on good terms with his many artist friends, and became the godmother of Monet’s first son, Jean.

The constant lack of money, however, led to some disagreement between Camille and Julie about how to raise their children. Concerns about their eldest son Lucien’s future was an ongoing issue.  Julie believed he should get a paying job to help the family, while Camille encouraged his focus on making art. In 1884, Camille wrote to Lucien:

CAMILLE PISSARRO: “Your mother is very worried…she says that I’m pushing you toward art rather than to think about earning a living; I don’t know if I’m wrong.”

NARRATOR: In the end, six of their children would become artists—no doubt due to Camille’s dedication to their artistic education. And when Lucien’s daughter, Orovida, showed talent at five, Pissarro exclaimed:

CAMILLE PISSARRO: “The deuce! Here is still another potential artist...Her drawings are already full of feeling and elegance... It’s a beautiful and happy thing that these children have this love of art.”

NARRATOR: Here, Pissarro’s minute brushstrokes create a pulsating texture that evokes the lush variety of flowers and grasses of an overgrown meadow. This would be his last summer in Pontoise before moving the family once more.

Although Pissarro remained in the countryside, his deep friendships forged early on in the Paris studios and museums—such as with Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, and Edgar Degas—endured, and many came to visit him.  Pissarro drew in so many artists that there was talk of a Pontoise school. They had all rejected academic art, and preferred working side by side, critiquing each other’s work as they experimented with color and technique. Pissarro, the eldest of the group, took on a mentorship role. Mary Cassatt would later say he was so effective that he could “teach the stones to paint properly.” 

But Pissarro’s constant struggle to sell would let bouts of self-doubt creep in. The year after he painted this Pontoise scene, he wrote his son Lucien:

CAMILLE PISSARRO: “Sometimes I am horribly afraid to turn around canvases that I have piled against the wall; I am constantly afraid of finding monsters where I believed there were precious gems!...However, at times I come across works of mine that are soundly done and really in my style, and at such moments I find great solace.”

NARRATOR: Vibrating green, yellow, and orange brushstrokes pulsate in Pissarro's The Haymaker, a subject that he would frequently depict. Here, a woman pauses from tedding, a task involving turning over hay with a pitchfork to help it dry.

This painting was made in 1884, the year of a collapse in the art market, and Pissarro’s dealer Paul Durand-Ruel was having financial difficulties. He could not purchase from the artist like before.

Pissarro anxiously wrote Monet:

CAMILLE PISSARRO: “I’m at the very end of my tether. I shall be forced to sell, for better or worse…it’s easy enough to talk of selling, but to whom? It’s driving me to distraction.”

“Do you have any news for me? I’ve received a letter from someone who said that Durand is absolutely lost …What are we to do? We should meet in Paris if we can and make a plan.”

NARRATOR: Pissarro let a few of his paintings go to another dealer, but Durand-Ruel rushed a small sum to Pissarro and asked him for patience. He advised Pissarro to put human figures aside for a time or make them incidental to his compositions. He felt the artist had a better chance of selling landscapes over pictures like The Haymaker. Pissarro resisted.

Their 32-year collaboration was bound to have its tensions, but the dealer supported Pissarro with admirable energy and determination. Later, after Pissarro died, Durand-Ruel and his sons continued to purchase paintings that came on the market, and mounted numerous solo exhibitions of his work in Paris and New York. Towards the end of his own life, Durand-Ruel poignantly revealed that he imagined paradise as having the sweetness of a Pissarro landscape.

NARRATOR: Pissarro had been interested in market scenes since his time in Caracas, Venezuela, and they continued to inspire him throughout his career. He was fascinated by the economic interrelationship between the fields and the town.

In these scenes, buyers and purchasers chat, gossip, jostle, bargain, and look at one another. It is a world dominated by women—the world of Julie Pissarro, rather than that of Camille’s. Julie prided herself on negotiating good prices in the markets of Pontoise and Gisors, but often had to do it on credit when money was tight.

Pissarro’ explored the subject of markets in a variety of scales and mediums, such as drawing, watercolor, gouache, tempera, pastel, etching, lithography, and oil paint. The year he made this one, he wrote to his son Lucien about the glories of watercolor:

CAMILLE PISSARRO: “Remember that watercolors help the memory, and enable you to retain the most fugitive effects—watercolors render so well the impalpable, the powerful, the delicate. And drawing is always indispensable. Divide your tones without worrying about the drying of the colors.”

NARRATOR: Here we see Pissarro experimenting with his technique—using small dashes of color to build up volumes and forms—rather than using the loose brushwork of impressionist spontaneity.

NARRATOR: In Éragny, Pissarro painted numerous views of the garden from differing vantage points and at varying times of the day and year. Pissarro intentionally chose unpretentious subjects. Often the compositions show simple, less-than-picturesque motifs such as scenes with the garden wall in the background, shrubbery and garden beds, and the path between the chicken coop and the house.

Here, a solitary female figure carrying pails—presumably Julie Pissarro—appears down the path next to the carefully tended gardens. The active, formative role of the human being distinguishes Pissarro’s garden scenes from the motifs of other Impressionists, who generally showed the landscape as the setting for middle-class leisure activities.

Although plein-air practice dominated Pissarro’s early Impressionist years, Pissarro sometimes worked indoors. Circumstances often forced him to.  Pissarro struggled with chronic eye infections for some time, and they worsened around 1889, making it difficult for him to paint outside. Months after he painted this scene, he wrote to Lucien:

CAMILLE PISSARRO: “My eye bothers me constantly. The slight change of weather induces an inflammation…”

NARRATOR: As the condition worsened, he received differing advice, which left him confused and anxious. He championed homeopathic medicine, but his eye problems led him to see an endless parade of doctors. Pissarro, true to form, remained upbeat, writing after an operation:

CAMILLE PISSARRO: “I will probably have fewer abscesses now, which will mean I can work a little. Besides, I’m getting used to the idea of having only one eye to work. It will still be better than nothing!”

NARRATOR: In September 1892 Camille Pissarro spent two weeks at the country home of writer and critic Octave Mirbeau, completing four large-scale views of his friend’s garden. A wild rhythm of dots and dashes build up the colorful floral splendor in a neo-impressionist style that Pissarro had been experimenting with at the time. He struggled with continuing in this new, time-consuming approach, writing:

CAMILLE PISSARRO: “What to do to have the purity and simplicity of dots as well as the full-bodied, supple, free, spontaneous, and fresh feel of our impressionist art? That’s what’s preoccupying me a great deal.”

NARRATOR: Octave Mirbeau shared Pissarro’s anarchist political views, but it was quite a u-turn for Mirbeau, who had been a former nationalist, known for writings with antisemitic undertones. Although Pissarro rarely discussed it in his letters, he knew that French society at the time was not entirely welcoming to Jews. The 1890s in particular saw a violent rise of anti-Semitism in France, and some of his friendships would become fractured.

Although Pissarro had abandoned any form of religious practice, he described himself and thought of himself as Jewish. He was alone amongst his artist circle in that regard, but not for long—the early decades of the 20^th century would see Jewish émigré artists flock to Paris and play important roles in the development of modern art.

NARRATOR: By the late 1890s, Pissarro’s numerous painting trips became vitally important to him as he continued to evolve his artistic practice. Pissarro particularly like Rouen, which he knew well, having visited three times before returning in 1898 where he would paint from his hotel windows, capturing a range of weather effects. The trip was also a chance to help him through the grief of losing his son, Felix, who had died of tuberculosis the year before this painting was made. Here, the wide Seine river reflects the misty, foggy sky above; and steam from the bustling ships mingle with the billowing smoke from the factory in the background. Here’s Genevieve Westerby once more:

GENEVIEVE WESTERBY: “Pissarro did return to subjects of industrialization in the late 1890s when he visited the port at Rouen.

It's interesting to compare [the] pictures with earlier ones, which have the brighter color palette that's more indicative of early Impressionism, compared to [the] Rouen pictures that have a much darker, muted tone to them, and far more examples of factories, and steamboats, and so much smoke that you can almost feel the air pollution.”

NARRATOR: These scenes of industrial progress illustrate Pissarro’s conviction that the arts were intimately bound to their times. The world continued to change, and Pissarro was not interested in succumbing to nostalgia—he admired the energy of this new era.

He would also find this energy in Paris, where he was finally financially secure enough to keep an apartment. His family would reunite with him there after he left Rouen, and together they would spend the winter in the bustling streets of the capital.

NARRATOR: Pissarro was thrilled to find an apartment in Paris that overlooked the Tuileries Gardens. It was a place where nature—shaped by human intervention—became part of the urban landscape.

Over the next few years, Pissarro would continue to travel between Paris, Éragny, small villages, and larger harbor towns, finding inspiration. By October of 1903, he was back in Paris, but felt unwell. His longtime doctor initially thought he had influenza, but his condition deteriorated rapidly. On November 13, surrounded by his family, Pissarro died from sepsis at the age of 73.

The funeral took place two days later in a civil ceremony where no speeches were made. There was a long procession that included his old friends: Monet, and Renoir, Durand-Ruel, Mirbeau, and others. There may not have been any speeches, but there were a great many articles written to mourn and laud the impressionist painter, the mentor, who was often called “père” or “father” by his fellow artists.

For Camille Pissarro, it was a life well lived—one dedicated to art and to his family until the very end. In an early letter, he had revealed:

CAMILLE PISSARRO: “Painting, art in general, enchants me. It is my life. What else matters? When you put all of your soul into a work, all that is noble in you, you cannot fail to find a kindred spirit who understands you… Is that not all an artist should wish for?”

NARRATOR: This is the last stop on your audio tour today – we hope you’ve enjoyed it. If you borrowed an audio device, please return it to the kiosk at the end of the exhibition. Thank you for listening.