The Honest Eye: Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism

Exhibition Guide

Camille Pissarro was a pivotal and galvanizing figure in the development of Impressionism in France in the late 1800s, yet he was an outsider in many circles. His Jewish and Danish Caribbean roots, his pictorial interests that favored everyday subject matter, and his anarchist sympathies definitively set him apart. He was the only artist to participate in all eight impressionist exhibitions and to consistently renounced the Paris Salon from 1870 onwards. Pissarro was a man who dedicated himself to his family and to his art, driven by his desire to seek honesty in nature through trusting his own sensations.

This exhibition presents nearly 100 portraits, landscapes, cityscapes, and still lifes from both sides of the Atlantic. It traces five decades of Pissarro’s career, honoring the evolution of the artist’s practice from his early years in the Caribbean and South America to his time in France, through the development of Impressionism and its transformations at the turn of the 1900s.

We modern painters are undeniably right to experiment, or rather to feel things differently, because we are different…

—Camille Pissarro to his son Lucien, 1898
A black and white photo of a family outdoors. An older bearded man sits in the center holding a child, surrounded by adults and children standing or sitting. Trees and a building are in the background.

The Pissarro family at Éragny, 1884. From left to right: Alfred Isaacson, Julie, Camille holding Jeanne; Georges in rear, Félix seated, and Rodo on Lucien’s knee. Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

A black and white image of a bearded man in a suit coat, posed for a portrait. In the foreground, a card that reads “carte d’exposant,1900, C. Pissarro.”

Pissarro’s carte d’exposant, allowing him to exhibit in the 1900 Exposition Universelle (World’s Fair) held in Paris.

Impressionist winter landscape with frost-covered fields, bare trees, and a winding dirt road. A figure walks along the path under a pale sky, evoking a cold, quiet morning in the countryside.

Hoarfrost at Ennery
1873
Oil paint on canvas
Musée d’Orsay, Paris: Bequest of Enriqueta Alsop in honor of Dr. Eduardo Mollard, 1972, RF 1972 27
Image courtesy akg-images / De Agostini Picture Lib. / G. Dagli Orti

This is one of the five paintings Pissarro presented at the first impressionist exhibition in 1874. A man with a cane carries a large burden of sticks on his back on the road to the French village of Ennery. The feathery hoarfrost glitters in a harmony of yellow, blue, and green, while a low winter sun filters through a stand of trees, creating long, rhythmic shadows across the canvas. Pissarro’s loose painting style and use of color—particularly in the shadows—was seen as revolutionary at the time.

101: Introduction with Christoph Heinrich, Hoar-frost at Ennery, 1873

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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.

The Honest Eye: Camille Pissarro's Impressionism is co-organized by the Denver Art Museum and the Museum Barberini, Potsdam.

It is presented by Jana and Fred Bartlit, Barbara Bridges, Bridget and John Grier, the Kristin and Charles Lohmiller Exhibitions Fund, and Craig Ponzio.

The exhibition is also supported by the Tom Taplin Jr. and Ted Taplin Endowment, Adolph Coors Exhibition Endowment Fund, Birnbaum Social Discourse Project, Lori and Grady Durham, Kathie and Keith Finger, Sally Cooper Murray, Ellen and Morris Susman, Lisë Gander and Andy Main, Mary Pat and Richard McCormick, Kent Thiry and Denise O'Leary, Robert Lehman Foundation, Christie's, the donors to the Annual Fund Leadership Campaign, and the residents who support the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD). This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Promotional support is provided by CBS Colorado.