Exhibition of Pictures by Camille Pissarro

Holding Institution: Victoria & Albert National Art Library

1 Shilling

Walter Sickert, Camden Town, 1911.

CAMILLE PISSARRO was born on the 10th July, 1830, at St. Thomas, in the Danish Antilles. He was sent, at the age of ten, to Paris for his education to the school of M. Savary, at Passy. His holidays were spent at the Louvre or in turning over the engravings that were displayed at the printsellers, whose stalls, at that date, clustered around the Palais Royal.

An indication that the boy showed from the first sine exceptional gift may be found in the fact that his master, instead of setting him, like the others, to copy lithographic examples, encouraged him to select studies from his own studio to draw.

When, in 1848, his school eduction was ended, and he went back to the Antilles, his master gave him as his parting advice the following direction. "above all," he said, "do not forget to draw some cocoa-nut trees from nature." His son tells me that his father followed this advice to the letter. I 1852-3, he embarked with the Danish painter Melbit for Venezuela where he did a considerable number of drawings. His family meanwhile had migrated from St. Thomas and returned to France leaving Camille and his brother-in-law, in charge of his father's business.

In 1855-6, Camille Pissarro himself returned to settle in France, working in Paris in the winter and the country in the summer. He profited greatly by the advice and encouragement given him by Corot, and though not officially his pupil. Pissarro's style may be said to have been founded on the method of Corot. I am speaking, of course, of the earlier Corot, the Corot of the solid weighty canvas of small dimensions treating mostly of architectural subjects, the Corot of the French collectors, not the Corot of the flimsy later manufacture that we cherish in Bond Street under the trade inscription of "silvery."

Im1869-70, Pissarro lived at Louveciennes,,as did also Claude Monet, Sisley and Renoir. something like a common language was evolved by these daily propinquities and sympathies.

I remember at lately as 1907, Degas saying to Guillaumin:-"What a pity we allowed outselves to ba called Impressionists." He went on to say that as a consequence, at the opening of each exhibition the Press awarded a number one to this one, a proxime accessit to another, and so on. As a matter of fact it was never the fashion to award a "number one" to Pissarro. There was nothing sensational about his gentle painter-like art. It did not make good copy. Not was he concerned that it should. To reminders that his one had had a medal, and that the other was making money, his invariable answer was:- "Il n'y a que la peinture que compte." This sentance would be his complete epitaph.

When the war of 1870 broke out, his house was exposed to the fire of the fort Mont Valerin. He was compelled to leave Louveciennes and his studio filled with canvases. As he had at that time never sold a picture it was practically his accumulated life-work that he left behind him, never to see that part of it again. The canvases were destroyed, iehter b the invading army, or by the pillage that followed in its wake. This is proved by the fact that none of these pictures have turned up since the signature became marketable. And we know that, in parallel case, works have a way of crawling out of their holes with astonishing promptness, and even in a state of astonishing multiplication. Pissarro remained for the duration of the war in England, at Sydenham, where he painted several fine pictures.

It was after the war that he settled in Pontoise, for, perhaps, the most characteristic decade of his artistic life. To this period his association with Cezanne, an association fruitful to both painters of immense mutual influence and inspiration. It is one of the entertaining ironies of fashion that Cezanne, ninety per cent. of whose work consists of monstrous and tragic failures, should have been deified by speculation in Paris, Berlin and New York while Pissarro's brilliant and sane efficiency awaits full justice.

It is still easy for the traveller, who only passes through Pontoise, the city in the Vexin Francais that reminded St. Louis of Jerusalem, to see the nourishment that the little orchards, bristling with bunches of leaves in the sun, the wood of old palings, the modest houses built of soft stone called moellon, diapered with black by smoke and with white by the droppings of pigeons, tinged with green by lichen, the linen hung out to dry by homely women in faded blue cotton gowns, must have been to Pissarro's talent. It is to this period that belong the important series in gouache, pastel, distemper and oil, dealing with peasant life and labour in the fields.

It is the material of Millet, seen with a gayer and more objective eye. Pissarro no more pitied the peasant than the peasant pities himself.

In 1884 he settled at Eragny for good. An infirmity of the lachrymal duct made outdoor work henceforward impossible. He produced a series of paintings from windows in Paris, Rouen, Havre and Dieppe. He died in 1903 from the effects of an operation, having worked with unimpaired vigour and elasticity to the last.

Pissarro's importance has not yet been properly understood. Writers on art have insisted so exclusively on that side of impressionism which dealt in series of studies of different efftects on one subject under different illuminations, that the whole gospel of impressionism was supposed to be limited thereto. To study the work of Pissarro is to see that the best traditions were being quietly carried on by a man essentially painter and poet. For the dark and light chiaroscuro of the past was substituted a new prismatic chiaroscuro. An intensified observation of colour was called in, which enabled the painter to get the effect of light and shade without rendering the shadow so dark as to be undecorative.

What the impressionists have taught can not be ignored again. Even here in England a new generation of painters, mostly under thirty, are giving incessant proof of the vitality of the principle.
Even in the England of Mr. Dicksee and of "Vertige," a new generation is learning that the visible world is infinite and interesting. That all has not been said when we have popped the jujube of sentimentality into our mouths and cried ourselves to sleep. Bereavement, death, regret, widowhood in nice weeds, pianos played by nice bereaved young persons in rooms nicely furnished in inferior studio taste, to quite nice bereaved, but still handsome men in dress suits supplied by ready-made tailors, no longer satisfy us. "The spiral staircase," I had the pleasure of hearing a distinguished nonconformist divine assert the other day " bends under the weight of the ascending ideal." A spiral staircase that bends is already broken, and we have no longer any use for an ideal that breaks down a staircase.

Walter Sickert, 'Camille Pissarro' (1911), pp. 3-8
Catalogue, pp. 9-12

Catalogue states in cover: "These Pictures, with some exceptions, are for sale. Prices may be had on application."