One of the first impressionists who made a huge contribution to world culture- Camille Pissarro. This artist's paintings can be recognized by their fine, coarse oil strokes, precise details, and sunny atmosphere. About him today and will be discussed.
Camille Pissarro: paintings, biography
This man was born into a merchant's family and had little chance of becoming a painter. Pissarro was even going to inherit his father's business until he met Fritz Melby, his first teacher. Already by that time young painter had skills in drawing, as he did this in his spare time. Most famous brought to an artist named Camille Pissarro paintings with titles:
- "Boulevard Montmartre in Paris";
- "Road to Rocancourt";
- "Square French theater in Paris";
- "Red Roofs";
- "Barges in La Roche Guyon";
- "Bank of the Oise River in Pontoise";
- "Woman Burning Branches"
Boulevard Montmartre in Paris
This picture is very fresh and bright. It depicts a road, a clear sky, a suburb and a few trees.
Warm colors are chosen very correctly, there are no bright contrasts in the picture.
Bluish, ocher, greenish spots on the canvas look very harmonious together. We can say that all the colors of the picture are pastel. This creates a feeling of comfort.
Many people are accustomed to the fact that the sky blue color. However, if you look closely, you can see many shades, as Camille Pissarro did. The paintings of this impressionist are full of reflexes and various color combinations. the sky is bright turquoise. Pure white is found only in the lightest parts of the clouds. Much more often in the clouds there are greenish and ocher shades, as if the sky has absorbed the color of grass and sand on the road. The artist added these shades in order to unite heaven and earth. If the sky were only blue, without shades, it would look separate, and the unity of the composition would be lost.
The foreground of the painting
On the left we see a small village, the roofs of its small houses. Near them - a small lawn of juicy. In the nearest house, you can distinguish the same green shutters. The hue of burnt brick goes well with yellow, ocher, gray and gray. These houses are at the same time different in shape, but very close in color scheme. Ahead is a man next to a wagon, in which We can understand it just by a few strokes, light and shadow. Pigeons gathered in a bunch on the ground, looking for something to profit from.
To the right of the road, a forest plantation appears before the viewer: several tall trees and a long bush. Not far from them is a woman who, apparently, cuts or waters the plants.
French theater square in Paris
This painting by Pissarro is one of the most famous, it is in the Hermitage. Like other paintings by the artist, it is very warm, made in greenish-ocher tones, slightly muted and light. On the square we see a lot of people, carts. Surprisingly, the whole picture is occupied by the earth and buildings, not a piece of the sky is visible. No one has done this yet, but Camille Pissarro portrayed it. why the artist painted in this way, and not otherwise - interesting activity for those who want to understand painting. Looking at the work "Square of the French Theater", the viewer does not see the sky, but this does not create a feeling of heaviness. Only dense crowns of chestnuts and tiny figures of people. In the trees, the artist used a lot of colors and their shades: there are not only greens here, but also reddish, brown, sandy shades. In these chestnuts, chiaroscuro is shown masterfully.
In the background are parts of the architecture that have not covered the branches of the trees. The buildings are very bright, you can see elements of columns and stucco near the windows. If you look at the left side of the picture, in the distance you can see two flowering trees in the square, cafes, shop counters. The artist depicted these details as wooden, with dark glasses.
A revolutionary in world painting, Camille Pissarro, whose paintings a hundred years after his death brought fortunes, is one of the most interesting artists in history.
Camille Pissarro was born on July 10, 1830. On the occasion of his birthday, we will not write a boring biography, instead we will tell 6 interesting facts from the artist's life in order to create a bright, colorful and light impression of him.
Pictured: Camille Pissarro. Apple pickers. 1888
Fact #1
Exactly Camille Pissarro had the strongest influence on European impressionism(from the French "impression"), being its actual forerunner and influencing the younger impressionists - Degas, Monet, Gauguin, Cezanne. The latter, by the way, was not only a friend, but a student Pissarro calling him "good god". Uniqueness of own technique Pissarro in a colorful, physical, tangible depiction of light and invisible space with dense yet light strokes of pure color that blend in the eye of the beholder to create vibrancy and depth. landscape palette Pissarro- very light, there are practically no pronounced shadows in it. Soon this technique was borrowed by other impressionists.
“I never doubted what was the basis of the path that we instinctively followed. The image of the air. Camille Passarro
Camille Pissarro. Peasant in the alley. 1876
Camille Pissarro. Landscape with a digging man. 1877
Fact #2
In 1870 Camille Pissarro married Julie Velley, his parents' maid, with whom he had been in a relationship since his studies at the Academy. In their marriage, 8 children were born, some of whom became artists. Julie was engaged in the cultivation and sale of vegetables, which provided them big family. Sometimes when financial condition The family was extremely deplorable, the artist was involved in the commercial activities of his father.
Camille Pissarro. Peasant women sitting on their knees. 1893
Camille Pissarro. Hay harvest. 1877
Fact #3
During the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-1871 Pissarro forced to move to London. Upon his return, unpleasant news awaits him: the German soldiers who lodged in his house destroyed about 1,500 works written by him over the past 20 years. Only 42 works escaped the German boot.
Camille Pissarro. Landscape near Pontoise. 1881
Camille Pissarro. Street in Pontoise. 1879
Fact #4
Camille Pissarro it was already 44 years old when the first exhibition of avant-garde artists (among them Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, Paul Cezanne and others), aptly named Impressionists, took place in Paris on the Boulevard des Capucines. There were eight such exhibitions, and only Camille Pissarro was a permanent participant in all eight, despite anti-Semitism (and Pissarro was a Jew) and poverty.
Camille Pissarro. The reapers are resting. 1891
Camille Pissarro. Egg market. 1894
Fact #5
The boulevards of Paris have become a favorite subject Camille Pissarro, portraits of a boiling, changeable city made up an essential part of his artistic heritage. The unusual angle of their writing is explained by the fact that their master painted from the windows of hotels. One of the masterpieces of this series - "Montmartre Boulevard in the Afternoon" (1897) is kept in the Hermitage.
Camille Pissarro. Boulevard Montmartre in the afternoon. Sunny. 1897
Camille Pissarro. Boulevard Montmartre. Foggy morning. 1897
Fact #6
The public split over the resonant Dreyfus Affair also affected the Impressionist company. Degas and Renoir openly supported anti-Semites, and Camille Pissarro together with Claude Monet and Emile Zola, he adhered to leftist views, sympathizing with the French officer who was innocently convicted and sentenced to life exile allegedly for spying for the German Empire Jewish origin. Because of these contradictions, Degas even refused to shake hands with a Jew. Pissarro.
Camille Pissarro. Breakfast. A young peasant woman is drinking coffee. 1881
Camille Pissarro died in 1903, and is buried in the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
Camille Pissarro, ohturning to modest motifs (urban suburbs and boulevards, rural landscapes), he discovered charm and poetry in everyday life, the inner aesthetic and spiritual value of seemingly ordinary moments in the life of nature and man ("Postal wagon in Louveciennes", 1870). Pissarro achieved particular subtlety in conveying the transparency and humidity of the air, the feeling of just past or approaching rain; at the same time, unlike most impressionists, he gravitated towards a more complete and clear construction of the composition, towards greater plastic certainty of forms ("Plowed Land", 1874).He was close to the radical left political movement.
Camille Pissarro was born July 10, 1830 at St. Thomas in the West Indies, where his father was a prosperous merchant. PHe was brought up at a school near Paris, where his talent as an artist was already manifested. On his return to St. Thomas he had little interest in family business and all my free time spent behind sketches of picturesque ports. And in 1852, leaving the family business, in the company of the Danish artist Fritz Melbue, Camille went to Venezuela, where he worked as an artist for two years.
In 1855 Pissarro moved to France. He came just in time to see the big exhibit. world exhibition, which includes a large section on art. Following the advice of Corot, whose landscapes he admired at the fair, Pissarro soon painted pictures and sketches in small towns and villages near Paris, along the rivers - Seine, Oise and Marne. He studied at the Académie Suisse. In their early works ah, the artist acted as a follower of Corot, and only since 1865, when Pissarro begins to be interested in the work of Edouard Manet and carefully studies the works of Courbet, the artist gradually finds his own style.
Hermitage in Poisans. 1868
During these years, Pissarro often visited Paris, visited the Gerbois cafe, which served as a meeting place for young artists. He met Renoir and Sisley and, like them, became interested in plein air painting. Pissarro was older than his comrades, he was better able to assimilate the basic principles of the French landscape school, its spirit of inquisitive realism and democratic tendency, which he brought to his circle of friends like a relay race. At this time evolution artistic method Pissarro runs parallel to the development of Renoir and Monet. He often painted small sketch landscapes that had the meaning of finished paintings; they were evidence of the search for a new pictorial method, which was based on direct observation of nature, the study of atmospheric phenomena, lighting effects, and color reflexes. Pissarro in the late 60s painted many sketches in Louveciennes, the main motive of which is the view of the road going into the distance, which is traditional for the landscape genre. Pissarro was interested in the changing states of nature, from the seasons - spring and autumn with their unstable weather; and here the very motif of the road that passed by his house should also have attracted him with its inconstancy - after all, the road does not have one appearance: in the morning a herd is driven along it, in the afternoon carts scurry about, a stagecoach carries passengers, in the evening belated travelers wearily wander along it.In the late 1860s, his realistic landscapes received high praise from prominent critics, including Emile Zola.
picking apples
During the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune (1870-71) Camille moved to England, where, together with Monet, he painted a series of landscapes around Northwood and Crystal Palace, and also studied the work of English landscape painters in museums. Upon returning home a year after the end of the war, Camille discovered that only 40 out of a thousand and a half paintings, and this is almost 20 years of work, remained intact.
In the summer of 1871, Camille settled in Pontoise, where he lived for the next 10 years, gathering a narrow circle of friends around him. Cezanne often comes to be with him, and under the influence of Camille to learn a more patient, painstaking understanding of nature.At this time, under the initiative of Monet, the first exhibitions of the group are held. french impressionists, in which Pissarro plays a key role and which bring a large portion of criticism to his work.At the first exhibition of the Impressionists, held in 1874, Pissarro gave five of his landscapes: "Orchard", "Chestnuts in Ovsni", "Garden in Pontoise", "June Morning". As you know, the exhibition caused a scandal. The painting "June Morning", depicting frost on plowed furrows, deserved several lines in an article by critic Louis Leroy, who coined the term "impressionism" as a mockery of rebel artists.
Chestnuts in Ovsni. 1873
Camille Pissarro takes under his patronage a young artist from Aix-en-Provence, P. Cezanne, and they work together in Pontoise. He shares with the young artist his experience in working with color, which, according to Camille Pissarro, was unique. pictorial medium: with its help it was possible not only to convey the material essence of the object, but also its shape. Laid next to light strokes of pure color begin to miraculously interact with each other, giving rise to a vibrating tonal range, and applied crosswise with parallel diagonals, they create a sense of depth and give the sound of the picture a certain rhythm ("Landscape in Pontoise", 1874; "Garden and flowering trees. Spring", 1877).
Spring in Pontoise. 1877
The landscapes of Camille Pissarro are not like the sparkling and artistic paintings of Claude Monet, but they are marked by a greater immediacy of a realistic perception of nature. Camille Pissarro very rarely uses the fragmentary "accident" of the composition, preferring to it a more complete construction of his canvases ("Entrance to the village of Voisin", 1872; "Inplowed land", 1874). This desire of Pissarro for orderliness of composition and weighty plasticity of forms is felt in his painting "Street in Sidham" (1871), which is also associated with the traditions of the artists of the Barbizon school. Soft lyricism marked the rural landscape "Red Roofs" (1877) .
Red roofs. 1877
In 1876 and 1877, the second and third Impressionist exhibitions were held. For the second, Pissarro sends twelve paintings. He, like his comrades, becomes the target of vitriolic criticism by Albert Wolff, who wrote: “Make Monsieur Pissarro understand that the trees are not purple, that the sky is not the color of fresh butter, that in no country will we find what he writes, and that there is no mind capable of perceiving such delusions "... At the third exhibition, twenty-two paintings by Pissarro appear, which indicate that nature in his art is acquiring new features. "Harvest" (1876) - a landscape painted in Brittany, where, according to the artist, he found "a real village."
In 1879, the Impressionists united at the fourth exhibition, where Pissarro, in addition to paintings, also exhibited fans and pastels. However, despite the fact that friendly relations connected the artists as before, their paths began to diverge.
Boulevard Montmartre at night. 1898
Pissarro, who possessed a genuine pedagogical gift, in the 80s for younger generation artists plays the role of a teacher. Not only his reasoning, but his painting itself - which accumulated in itself both the tradition of realism of the middle of the century, and the light coloring introduced by Claude Monet, and, finally, the tendency to generalize pictorial masses and compositional forms - was the most objective expression of experience landscape painting those years. Therefore, the artistic achievements of Pissarro in the eyes of the young seemed like an impetus for further quests. In 1885, Pissarro met Signac and Seurat and joined the Neo-Impressionist movement headed by Seurat. Signac later argued that Pissarro could have come to Neo-Impressionism through his own evolution. There is probably some truth in this, since Pissarro's attempts to streamline his pictorial system prepared him for the perception of the principles put forward by Seurat. The works of this time testify that the artist continued to retain all the features of his creative individuality.
last twenty years of life Camille Pissarro is a period of fruitful and varied creativity. To the lookpainter rural scenery, one more facet is added - he becomes an artist of the city. Pissarro worked for a long time in Rouen, Le Havre on views of streets, squares, embankments. He focuses not on the sights of the city, not on the peculiarities of the architecture of this or that monument of antiquity, but on creating a whole image-impression, valuable for its unique charm. The artist turns groups of crowded old houses into picturesque masses, admires the contrasts of shadows enveloping the lower floors and bright sunlight that hardly enters the narrow streets.
Most Pissarro spent years away from Paris. But in the 90s, the province began to weigh him down, in last years he began to spend his life in Paris every winter. Like all impressionists, Camille Pissarro loved to paint the city, which captivated him with its endless movement, the flow of air currents and the play of light. He perceived it as a living, restless organism, capable of changing depending on the season, the degree of illumination.Late landscapes of Paris are among the most famous works Pissarro. Particularly famous are the series of paintings depicting the Opera passage and the Boulevard Montmartre.
Opera passage in Paris. 1899
The landscape is dominated light tone- in the film "Opera Drive, Snow Effect", buildings are drowned in a shroud of snow mixed with rain, passers-by with umbrellas turn into light, elusive shadows. Elongated, horizontal strokes make all forms, as if under the power of a humid atmosphere, vibrate and blur in breadth; bluish, yellow, pink shades seem to be the result of refracting white daylight; masses of damp air that flooded the square seem to thicken and turn into a dense fog at the end of the Opera passage. These paintings are so deeply embedded in the history of art that it is now impossible to imagine the traditional image of Paris otherwise than through the eyes of Pissarro. IN 90s he gained fame in his own country and abroad; paintings found wide circle amateurs, were regularly exhibited in the galleries of Durand-Ruel. In Eragny, he built himself a large workshop convenient for work. Friends-artists often came to visit him, and in the winter in Paris, Camille Pissarro was at the center of a youth circle - painters, writers and critics, to whom he outlined his understanding of the tasks of painting, sought to sum up impressionism and formulate the principles of this trend in painting.
Pissarro died November 13, 1903 and was buried in Paris at the Pere Lachaise cemetery.
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Louvre. Morning. 1903
Everything is fine, you just need to be able to look closely.
Life is a series of small celebrations: morning sun, breakfast, picnics and dinners with friends.
Camille Pissarro
culture
I appreciate his strict and serious style, special respect for truth and accuracy in art, strong, invincible will... Pissarro is the artist that I like.
Emile Zola
The first signs of avant-gardism, special novelty, even rebellion, appeared in the paintings of artists who sought to capture on their canvases real world as naturally and naturally as possible, convey its variability, “grab” the very first impression, impression - hence impressionism, after for long years struggle and reproach victoriously entered art. star names seven French artists who gave us impressionism - Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot.
Now the New York Jewish Museum, which is located in Manhattan on Fifth Avenue, has opened an extensive exhibition of wonderful landscapes and genre paintings Pissarro. It is noteworthy that all 50 marvelous paintings are from New York and surrounding museums and collectors' houses.
The Americans were among the first to collect works of the Impressionists, paying particular attention to Pissarro. That is why the state of New York is so rich in the paintings of the patriarch of Impressionism, and in little Olana there is even an excellent museum of Pissarro's early works. After all, he really took place as an artist very early, and his fate, his work, the way of creating impressionism and his life path are indissoluble.
The leader of impressionism was the son of a businessman, a French Jew from Bordeaux, who settled on the then Danish island of St. Thomas (we are more accustomed to saying Saint Thomas) in the Caribbean, and his wife Rachel from the Manzano-Pomi family, Portuguese Jews who had lived here for many decades . Camille was born here in 1830 (there is a wonderful museum- do not forget to visit it if fate brings you to the Caribbean).
Already at the age of twelve the boy left parental home to study in Paris. There, a keen interest in art manifested itself, which did not leave him when he returned home five years later. He began to make sketches, and then transfer to the canvas everything that woke up his imagination: exotic landscapes of the island, its inhabitants, the sea and ships. The father did not want to hear about the artistic education of his son. And the young man simply fled to Caracas, where at the age of 23 he just began to study the canons of painting. Talent and will won. And Camille again found himself in France.
The deepest comprehension of nature, complete merging with it, became the basis of his work throughout his life. But if his teacher Camille Corot in his paintings emphasized the eternal and sublime nature of nature, then Pissarro at the same time tried to stop the moment, bring it closer, give the viewer the joy of feeling like a particle of the surrounding world, as we are convinced, enchantedly peering into the immense depth of the canvases of that section of the exhibition, which was rightly called "Nature and Feelings". How beautiful, how poetic the "Country Road", the sea bay and the lonely sail, the orchard in winter - sadness itself, the winter landscape, amazing in mood: a snow-covered village and a rider carefully making his way along a slippery road. Nature, feelings and truth - this was the concept of his work.
At that time in Paris, the artist met Julie Valley, who was once a servant of his mother. Former youthful love broke out with new force- now for life, as a passion for painting, because Pissarro did not know how to do anything halfway. Julie became his lover, and after the birth of her second child - his wife. most devoted. In total, eight children were born in the family.
Pissarro became friends with the young artists Cezanne, Renoir, Sisley, especially with Monet, for whom he was not just a friend, but an older brother, even a father. All of them were like-minded, longing for the renewal of the creative arsenal, a different approach to painting. They brought freshness and immediacy of the perception of life into art, the image of instantaneous, as it were, random movements and situations, apparent imbalance, unexpected angles. It was Pissarro, together with Monet and Sisley, who laid the foundations of the impressionistic landscape and developed a consistent plein air system. Working for outdoors, the artists created the feeling of sparkling sunbeams, the dissolution of volumetric forms in the quivering vibrations of light and air. As, for example, in a reddish tone, Pissarro's landscape “Sunset. Brickworks".
Camille worked like a man possessed. Louvien became his nest, where he settled next to Monet and Renoir. There were born new, hitherto unseen creations. A good dozen of them are at the exhibition.
During the Franco-Prussian War, Pissarro and Monet left France with their families, settling in England, whose discreet landscapes had long attracted Camille. His landscapes of the London suburbs are beautiful. Some of them are now in the Jewish Museum, including the famous "St. Anne's Cathedral". When the family returned in 1871, it was found that the house was filthy with German soldiers, and many of the paintings were hopelessly damaged.
Fleeing from the high cost of Paris, many artists settled near the capital. Pissarro also found a house for himself - next to Cezanne, with whom he became even closer friends - in Pontoise, where artists gathered and where they worked.
Pontoise became a kind of Mecca of Impressionism. We can also visit there by visiting the exhibition.
The surrounding nature suggested to Pissarro the themes of his works. “I just need a place where beauty lives,” he said. He worked in the open air even in winter, warming his chilled fingers over the fire. The transfer of light and air by the master is amazing, the finest nuance of color, which gives Pissarro's works a unique charm. “He wrote off nature’s most sophisticated effects,” wrote one of the Parisian newspapers.
The artist wrote a lot, truthfully and expressively, of working people, he wrote unusually emotionally: peasant women harvesting hay; a farmer with a bucket in a peasant yard in the forest, another tired young woman selling herbs in the market... Amazing engravings - lightness of lines, flight: "Rain Effect", "Dockers", "Port in Rouen". Always and everywhere - a deep social meaning.
Pissarro worked frantically, but burdened big family, was constantly in need, which he complained about in woeful letters to his eldest son Lucien, who later became a good impressionist artist, whose fame drowned in the sea of glory of his great father. This impressive correspondence, which became a valuable document, lasted 20 years - until the death of the elder Pissarro. In some letters, Camille expressed dissatisfaction with his work. He was thirsty constant update style and painting technique and therefore became interested in neo-impressionism, giving him several years of creativity. Unfortunately, this did not bring success, which is strangely unbelievable. "Sowing in Eragny", "Sunset", and especially "The Big Walnut Tree in the Sunlight" (all of them at the exhibition) are simply masterpieces. Pissarro returned to the old style of painting.
The artist's wife, completely exhausted by eternal poverty, decided to sell her handicrafts and her two younger children. That's truly funny situations sometimes life offers: these primitive pictures, a kind of French popular print, were sold out much faster than the creations of the great Pissarro, which now cost tens of millions of dollars!
Camille is still respected by the pioneers of Impressionism, they are still friends who remember the support and warmth Father Pissarro, as they called him. But there is no former unity. Starting together, each went his own way, different from the others. Pissarro, the only one of them, was presented at all nine Impressionist salons - exhibitions - from the first explosively scandalous, spat on in 1874, to triumphant ones. This is a striking fact: when the vile campaign to accuse Dreyfus of espionage raged in the nineties of the century before last, all of France was divided into two camps. Pissarro, Monet, Sisley, Morisot, American artist Marie Cassatt, along with Emile Zola, fiercely defended the slandered officer, while Cezanne, Renoir and Degas were on the side of the government. It's not that that's scary, but the fact that long-term comrades allowed themselves antisemitic remarks to Pissarro, which shocked him and hurt him painfully.
In 1892, a large exhibition of Pissarro's paintings was organized. It was the first experience of exhibiting paintings from private collections. "All Paris" gathered at the vernissage. Full house! The exhibition was a triumph. She finally improved financial situation the artist's family and marked the beginning of financial stability. But the trials, alas, are not over. The old artist was overtaken by misfortune - a serious eye disease that did not allow him to work under open sky. Nature was his nature, his heart called to the open air, and he was a prisoner of cramped rooms. But didn't give up! Pissarro rented a room in an inexpensive hotel, where, sitting by the window, he painted 24 of his famous Parisian landscapes. Four of them, including the famous Avenue Opera, the Louvre at noon and the Pont Royal in cloudy weather, along with five late urban landscapes, are on display today. Paris and Parisians - day and night, illuminated by the sun, rain and fog. And we accept, as completely natural, a view of the street from above and from the side, we merge into the crowd moving in a continuous stream, flickering in the gap between the trees, we admire the streets and squares, the figures of people painted in summary, as if eluding our gaze, and color solution that makes you feel sunlight and transparent shadows. The artist, half-blind, continued to work.
Pissarro rarely made portraits, but in the last years of his life old master with enthusiasm wrote his big friendly family. Again and again - children, mother, beloved Julie. In the year of his death, the artist created the famous self-portrait in a black hat, with a gray, some kind of transparent beard. He looks at us intently and benevolently. In the eyes - wisdom and faith in life.
Pissarro worked tirelessly throughout his life. More than 1600 works made in oils, gouache, tempera and pastels, including on porcelain and even on fans, and almost two hundred more excellent engravings speak of the highest level almost half a century creative work master of genius. He believed that "a person must be sure of success to the end, even when it seems that there is no more hope."
To get to the Jewish Museum, which is located on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street, it is convenient to take subway trains 4, 5 or 6 to the 86 Street stop. On Thursdays from 5 to 8 pm admission is free.
