GENERAL DESCRIPTION
After spending his youth in the Danish West Indies, Camille Pissarro settled in France in 1855. On his arrival in Paris, he registered at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Suisse. Like Claude Monet, Pissarro’s early attempts at exhibiting at the Salon met with a tepid response, and he sought out alternative venues. Along with artists such as Monet and Auguste Renoir, Pissarro showed his work at all eight impressionist exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886; his The Harvest at Montfoucault of 1876 was included that year. In the 1880s Pissarro shifted his focus to large-scale figure paintings. To his chagrin, critics often compared the peasant pictures he began making to those of Jean-François Millet. As his humanitarian anarchism crystalized during the 1880s, figure subjects gave him greater scope than landscapes did to construct images of rural life. This shift may have had something to do with increasing his marketability, because peasant pictures were popular with consumers. Both traditional and avant-garde artists admired the work of Pissarro—Jules Breton and Léon L’Hermitte alike praised the peasant compositions. In 1886 Vincent van Gogh’s brother Theo, who showed Pissarro’s paintings at his gallery in Paris, introduced the two artists. Pissarro’s combination of peasant subject matter and neo-impressionist style spoke to Van Gogh, who observed in a letter to Theo in June 1888 that “what Pissarro says is true, you must boldly exaggerate the effects of either harmony or discord which colors produce. It is the same as in drawing—the drawing, accurate color, is perhaps not the essential thing to aim at, because the reflection of reality in a mirror, if it could be caught, color and all, would not be a painting at all, nothing more than a photograph.” Pissarro continued to work in Paris until his death in 1903.
Adapted from
Dorothy Kosinski, Van Gogh's Sheaves of Wheat (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, 2006), 111.
NOTES
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See Joachim Pissarro, Camille Pissarro (London: Harry N. Abrams, 1993), and Richard Thomson, Camille Pissarro: Impressionism, Landscape, and Rural Labor, exh. cat. (London: The Herbert Press, 1990).
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Reves Collection tour stop, a biography of Camille Pissarro
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Photographic Portrait of the artist Camille Pissarro circa 1900.
Source: Camille Pissarro, Publ. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Wikimedia Commons, accessed July 18, 2016.
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General Description
After spending his youth in the Danish West Indies, Camille Pissarro settled in France in 1855. On his arrival in Paris, he registered at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Suisse. Like Claude Monet, Pissarro’s early attempts at exhibiting at the Salon met with a tepid response, and he sought out alternative venues. Along with artists such as Monet and Auguste Renoir, Pissarro showed his work at all eight impressionist exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886; his The Harvest at Montfoucault of 1876 was included that year. In the 1880s Pissarro shifted his focus to large-scale figure paintings. To his chagrin, critics often compared the peasant pictures he began making to those of Jean-François Millet. As his humanitarian anarchism crystalized during the 1880s, figure subjects gave him greater scope than landscapes did to construct images of rural life. This shift may have had something to do with increasing his marketability, because peasant pictures were popular with consumers. Both traditional and avant-garde artists admired the work of Pissarro—Jules Breton and Léon L’Hermitte alike praised the peasant compositions. In 1886 Vincent van Gogh’s brother Theo, who showed Pissarro’s paintings at his gallery in Paris, introduced the two artists. Pissarro’s combination of peasant subject matter and neo-impressionist style spoke to Van Gogh, who observed in a letter to Theo in June 1888 that “what Pissarro says is true, you must boldly exaggerate the effects of either harmony or discord which colors produce. It is the same as in drawing—the drawing, accurate color, is perhaps not the essential thing to aim at, because the reflection of reality in a mirror, if it could be caught, color and all, would not be a painting at all, nothing more than a photograph.” Pissarro continued to work in Paris until his death in 1903.
Adapted from
Dorothy Kosinski, Van Gogh's Sheaves of Wheat (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, 2006), 111.
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Notes
%UMO for review, image asset
See Joachim Pissarro, Camille Pissarro (London: Harry N. Abrams, 1993), and Richard Thomson, Camille Pissarro: Impressionism, Landscape, and Rural Labor, exh. cat. (London: The Herbert Press, 1990).
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