This article is part of the Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on how creativity can inspire in challenging times.
He was widely regarded as the first of the Impressionists, born into a Jewish family on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas in 1830, four years before the birth of Degas, nine years before Cézanne, 10 years before Monet and 11 years before Renoir.
Over time, Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro became much more — a friend, mentor and competitor to other Impressionists as their radical styles broke from the Neo-Classicism and Romanticism of the period, turning away from the emotional and dramatic paintings of heroic figures and nature favored by an earlier generation. Theirs was a fresh approach, using blazing colors in shifting light to capture the scenes before them.
Yet despite Pissarro’s seniority, his prolific output and vaunted status as an artistic pioneer, his legacy seldom achieved the acclaim of his brethren, leaving him in the shadow of Monet and the others. Monet’s water lilies, Degas’s ballet dancers, Renoir’s sensual portraits — all became more familiar and celebrated than any single Pissarro work. And paintings by other Impressionists far surpassed Pissarro’s record auction price of $32.1 million for “Le Boulevard de Montmartre, Matinée de Printemps,” at a 2014 Sotheby’s sale. An 1890 Monet painting, “Meules” (Haystacks) fetched $110.7 million at Sotheby’s in 2019, a record for any Impressionist painting.
But maybe now a new show at the Denver Art Museum, the first major Pissarro exhibition in the United States since 1981, helps even the scales of honor a bit. In conjunction with the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany, “The Honest Eye: Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism,” opens on Oct. 26 as a retrospective of nearly 100 works, highlighting Pissarro’s contribution to what endures as one of the world’s most popular artistic movements. The show runs through Feb. 8 of next year. (Pissarro’s auction-record painting is not in the exhibition, museum officials said.)
The Denver show also comes as Impressionism is having a moment in other museums. On display at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art through Jan. 25 is “The Impressionist Revolution: Monet to Matisse.” The Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco is showing “Manet & Morisot,” which focuses on the friendship between two French Impressionists, through March 1. An ongoing exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art, “Impressionism Across the Atlantic,” includes works by Monet, Pissarro, Cézanne and several American artists, and remains on view until April 5.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is planning a big Impressionism show to start on Dec. 21, built on works from the museum’s own collection and loans from “major Hollywood collectors,” according to the museum.
Other major museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, always have Impressionists on display. So it is not that Impressionism is back; it is that it never went away.
The Denver exhibition stands apart from others by focusing on a single artist, with the intent to show how his evolving style and interests contrasted with those of his contemporaries, even if their subjects were sometimes similar.
Monet, for example, painted lovely rural scenes, many of them unpopulated, while Pissarro often included people engaged in everyday activities of the time, providing a window into both contemporary life and the slow march through agrarian change. In a muted 1884 landscape, “Peasants Harvesting Hay,” Pissarro placed seven workers lifting pitchforks in the foreground and 11 others deep in the background. Even a portrait called “Washerwoman, Study” from 1880 shows the subject weary, still in her work clothes, suggesting the end of a long day toiling in the field.
“For me, Monet is a painter of the eternal Sunday,” said Christoph Heinrich, the Denver museum director since 2010. “Pissarro was a painter of the rest of the week.”
But Heinrich is intrigued by Pissarro for other reasons, he said, not least because he is often overlooked by the greater adulation for other Impressionists, even with his willingness to mentor younger artists and share his ideas and techniques.
“Pissarro,” Heinrich said, “was someone who had a big influence on other painters.”
Like many of his contemporaries, Pissarro initially drew criticism, even scorn, for the audacity of his Impressionist works before art critics and the public gradually warmed to the new colorful, gauzy, light-infused style that endured for decades and became a launchpad of sorts for artistic “isms” that followed.
Through it all, Pissarro charted his own creative course, moving from works influenced by his early years in the islands and visits to Venezuela to his more familiar paintings of rural and urban scenes around France, which became his permanent home in 1855. In later years, he took a brief stab at Pointillism before growing bored with it and moving on to busy scenes of urban life around Paris, which appeared to chronicle French life beginning to modernize at the turn of the century.
“He was not interested in nostalgia,” said Lauren Thompson, an interpretive specialist at the Denver museum who helped organize the show and became familiar with letters that Pissarro wrote to family, dealers and friends explaining his artistic interests. “There’s this idea of an honest eye coming in. He said Impressionism for him felt like an honest art, and he had an honest eye about what he saw and captured.”
Pissarro maintained that approach as his style evolved, “always pushing boundaries,” as Heinrich said. In the 1880s, when Impressionism became a more accepted art form, Pissarro pivoted again, turning to Pointillism.
He admired Seurat, perhaps the best-known of the Pointillists, but not necessarily for his tedious approach of building his paintings with tiny dots of color. Pissarro favored larger dabs, concluding that a canvas of dots took too much time to complete. An 1888 painting, “The Flock of Sheep,” demonstrates his preference for a bolder application of paint, blurring his dabs into hazy colors. The herder appears almost in shadow, and his sheep are only slightly distinguishable from one another.
As the 20th century drew closer, Pissarro pivoted again, in part owing to his degrading eyesight, advancing age and fascination with vibrant street life in and around Paris. A series of paintings of the Pont Neuf over the Seine in 1901 and 1902 reflects an energetic city moving into the modern age, with horse-drawn carriages proceeding smartly in both directions across a bridge lined with hundreds of people. Pissarro was also drawn to harbor scenes of sailboats, working ships and quayside cranes, with scores of people watching or working.
In these final years, he moved about the city, sometimes painting what he could see from a hotel window to provide a different perspective. By late 1903, his health was failing, and he died of sepsis in November at age 73. He was buried in a most fitting setting, the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, the resting place for scores of artists, writers and performers, including Seurat, Caillbotte and Modigliani.
The inspiration for a Pissarro show was the success of a 2019 collaboration between the Denver and Barberini museums on a Monet exhibition, which first showed in Denver to record crowds, then moved on to Potsdam.
For Pissarro, Potsdam went first, and Heinrich predicted the exhibition would prove as popular in Denver as the Monet show had been — but for a reason more consistent with Pissarro.
“We’re so used to images that are tinkered with, photoshopped or now completely carried away with what A.I. does,” he said. “Here we have someone who was 100 percent determined to show something exactly the way he saw it. There’s a trust, an honesty, an authenticity in it. That’s exceptional, and it’s something we can learn from.”
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