Path to Impressionism

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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