Camille pissarro impressionism
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Like those of his Impressionist cohorts, his paintings are delicate studies of the effect of light on color in nature. Georges Seurat and his followers concerned themselves with Pointillism, the systematic use of tiny dots of colour. While the clothing is that of the French countryside, the figures and their peaceful surroundings achieve a certain universality via the lack of recognizable landmarks and the anonymity with which Pissarro paints the peasants' facial features.
Oil on canvas - The Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
1892
Two Young Peasant Women
A late manifestation of Pissarro's favorite theme, this painting depicts two young, female peasants taking a moment away from their work.
"This little valley, this hill have a heroic simplicity and forthrightness.
Their artistic interchange lasted for decades, and Cézanne, three years after Pissarro's death, identified himself in a retrospective exhibition as "Paul Cézanne, pupil of Pissarro." Specifically, Cézanne's work shows a willingness to construct a painting not only via the intense study of nature, but also through the manipulation of color to arrive at a "truer" visual image.
Gauguin famously painted his early Pissarro's Garden, Pontoise while staying with Pissarro in 1881. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.
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Avenue de l'Opera, Place du Theatre Francais.
Impressionist Techniques
(1) Short, thick strokes of paint quickly capture the essence of the subject, rather than its details. She holds a Japanese fan: an object that at once suggests her own beauty, preciousness, and delicacy, as well as her father's love of Far Eastern art. While the Salon jury routinely accepted nudes in historical and allegorical paintings, they condemned Manet for placing a realistic nude in a contemporary setting.
Influenced artistically by the Realist painter Gustave Courbet, Pissarro's paintings dignify the labor of peasants in communal villages, reflecting the socialist-anarchist political leanings that the two artists shared.
The paint is often applied impasto.
(2) Colours are applied side-by-side with as little mixing as possible, creating a vibrant surface. Members of the association, which soon included Cezanne, Berthe Morisot, and Edgar Degas, were expected to forswear participation in the Salon. Though Pissarro had work accepted at the official Salon in 1859, he would exhibit at the Salon des Refusés with Édouard Manet's dissident circle in the 1860s, an important antecedent to his contributions to the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874.
Mature Period
The first half of the 1870s is considered the height of Pissarro's career, when he completed some of his most significant pieces, including Hoar Frost, the Old Road to Ennery, Pontoise (1873).
His daughter Jeanne-Rachel (nicknamed "Minette") grew ill and died of tuberculosis in 1874 at the age of eight, an event that deeply impacted Pissarro, leading him to paint a series of intimate paintings detailing the last year of her life.
Pissarro began submitting to the Salon in the late 1860s. Colour was somber and conservative, and traces of brush strokes were suppressed, concealing the artist's personality, emotions, and working techniques.
Gauguin affectionately referred to the "intuitive" nature of Pissarro's art, and Gauguin's frank and naive rendering of French peasants in his early career and Tahitian villagers in his mature work owes to Pissarro's direct, unadorned depictions of the rural countryside.
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The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page.
The purple hills that extend from the left middle frame downward toward the ocean act as a dividing line in the background, demonstrating Pissarro's ability to merge the local color of the Caribbean with the gentle color palette of the Barbizon School, the group of French painters who first stressed the necessity of painting landscapes outdoors.
Younger painters during the 1890s and early 20th century worked in geographically disparate regions and in various stylistic categories, such as Fauvism, led by Henri Matisse and Cubism led by Picasso. They gathered at the Cafe Guerbois, where the discussions were often led by Edouard Manet, whom the younger artists greatly admired.
They exhibited together - albeit with shifting membership - eight times between 1874 and 1886. From 1870 to 1871, he fled to London to escape the chaotic events of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, during which time the majority of his earlier works were destroyed.