The Impressionism

 

Art Styles in 19th century - Art Map



 

Camille Pissarro



 

Camille Pissarro

(b Charlotte Amalie, St Thomas, Danish Virgin Islands, 10 July 1830; d Paris, 13 Nov 1903).

Painter and printmaker. He was the only painter to exhibit in all eight of the Impressionist exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886, and he is often regarded as the ‘father’ of the movement. He was by no means narrow in outlook, however, and throughout his life remained as radical in artistic matters as he was in politics. Thadée Natanson wrote in 1948: ‘Nothing of novelty or of excellence appeared that Pissarro had not been among the first, if not the very first, to discern and to defend.’ The significance of Pissarro’s work is in the balance maintained between tradition and the avant-garde. Octave Mirbeau commented: ‘M. Camille Pissarro has shown himself to be a revolutionary by renewing the art of painting in a purely working sense; at the same time he has remained a purely classical artist in his love for exalted generalizations, his passion for nature and his respect for worthwhile traditions.’
 

La Cote des Boeufs, the Hermitage
Oil on canvas
1877
National Gallery, London