Camille Pissarro - Barges at Pontoise [1876]

Camille Pissarro - Barges at Pontoise [1876], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

In 1872 Pissarro and his family settled in the village of Pontoise. Of the six views he painted in 1876 of the barges and factories along the banks of the Oise, this one is stylistically the boldest. While each of the brushstrokes serves a descriptive function, attention to detail is minimal.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 46 x 54.9 cm]

Camille Pissarro - Jalais Hill, Pontoise [1867]

Camille Pissarro - Jalais Hill, Pontoise [1867], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The pictures that Pissarro painted in the late 1860s at Pontoise, a small village near Paris, are among his most important early works. These views of lanes, farm buildings, hillsides, and fields are firmly structured in composition and are characterised by strong brushstrokes and broad, flat areas of colour that owe much to the work of Courbet and Corot, whose paintings were then on view in large exhibitions in Paris.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 87 x 114.9 cm]

Camille Pissarro - The Fence [1872]

Camille Pissarro - The Fence [1872], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Pissarro (French, 1830 - 1903), who was committed to socialist principles, identified strongly with the land and with the peasant farmers who worked it. He moved with his family from Paris in the 1860s to a number of small villages like Louveciennes. While many of his fellow impressionists chose subjects from modern life and leisure, sophisticated even if their settings were in the countryside, Pissarro preferred scenes of an older, more rural way of life like this garden fence and the small figures who pause in their work.

It was in the early 1870s that Pissarro made his most purely impressionist pictures, painted, as this one probably was, in a single session on the spot. The paint here is quickly applied, thick in some areas, much thinner in others. We can see, in the trees, for example, where one brushstroke has been pulled through an earlier one that still lay wet on the canvas.

[National Gallery of Art, Washington - Oil on canvas, 37.8 x 45.7 cm]

Camille Pissarro - The Route to Versailles, Louveciennes [1869]

Camille Pissarro - The Route to Versailles, Louveciennes [1869], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

In 1869, Pissarro moved to No. 22 on the road to Versailles in the Paris suburb of Louvciennes. He was joined by Claude Monet who was then at nearby Saint Michel. In the winter of 1869/70, they both painted snow scenes showing this roadway from varying angles. The road to Versailles, on the north side of the village, afforded a superb view of Paris in the distance. The impressionists inherited from the Barbizon artists of a generation earlier an interest in the representation of winter, particularly, the challenge of the rendering of snow. Pissarro's early works are relatively rare because the German troops who had been billeted in his house on the road to Versailles during the Franco-Prussian War had wrecked many of them.

[Walters Art Museum, Baltimore - Oil on canvas, 38.4 x 46.3 cm]

Camille Pissarro - Steamboats in the Port of Rouen [1896]

Camille Pissarro - Steamboats in the Port of Rouen [1896], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

This is one of fifteen paintings that Pissarro executed in Rouen in the autumn of 1896. Most of the works were painted from the window of his room at the Hôtel d'Angleterre. This view shows the busy quay with the working-class quarter of Saint-Sever across the river in the background.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 45.7 x 54.6 cm]

Camille Pissarro - L’Île Lacroix, Rouen (The Effect of Fog) [1888]

Camille Pissarro - L’Île Lacroix, Rouen (The Effect of Fog) [1888], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Pissarro created the present painting from an earlier composition in his studio rather than in front of the motif, which was his usual practice. He had visited Rouen in 1883 and made several drawings and etchings of the Seine that he consulted five years later when painting this foggy view of factories and barges on the river. An industrial landscape dominated by a smoke-belching chimney, the scene is rendered with great beauty in a subtle range of colours. The broad, flat frame with its laurel-leaf border was designed by Pissarro for this picture, though it may originally have been painted white.

[Philadelphia Museum of Art, oil on canvas, 46.7 x 55.9 cm]

Camille Pissarro - Two Women Chatting by the Sea, St. Thomas [1856]

Camille Pissarro - Two Women Chatting by the Sea, St. Thomas [1856], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

See: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPjlFPZ0C8Y

[Oil on canvas, 27.7 x 41 cm]

Camille Pissarro - Harvest, Pontoise [1881]

Camille Pissarro - Harvest, Pontoise [1881], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

At the centre of this painting are three figures gathering potatoes; they are united in the composition as they occupy a green, grassy knoll and toil under the shade of a tree. A fourth figure can be seen on the left, his actions unrecognisable from such a distance. All are labouring on a hill that slopes down to the right and occupies the majority of the canvas. 

The theme of potato gathering recurs in Pissarro’s oeuvre in a number of mediums, pencil, gouache, oil, and prints, over a period of thirty years. In the Lehman painting, Pissarro’s treatment of the subject is carefully structured while remaining expressive in tone and in brushwork. The artist is both borrowing a traditional subject matter from the great Barbizon painter Camille Corot, while anticipating the more staccato, broken brushwork of later artists such as Georges Seurat.

[Oil on canvas, 46 x 55.2 cm]

Camille Pissarro - Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning [1897]

Camille Pissarro - Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning [1897], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

After spending six years painting in the rural setting of Éragny, Pissarro returned to Paris, where he produced several series of the "grands boulevards." As Pissarro surveyed the view from his lodgings at the Grand Hôtel de Russie in early 1897, he marveled that not only could he "see down the whole length of the boulevards" but he had "almost a bird's-eye view of carriages, omnibuses, people, between big trees, big houses that have to be set straight." From February through April, he set out to record, in two views of the Boulevard des Italiens to the right, and fourteen of the Boulevard Montmartre to the left, the spectacle of urban life as it unfolded below his window.

[Oil on canvas, 64.8 x 81.3 cm]

Camille Pissarro - The Artist’s Garden at Eragny [1898]

Camille Pissarro - The Artist’s Garden at Eragny [1898], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Oil on canvas, 73.4 x 92.1 cm]

Camille Pissarro - Houses at Bougival (Autumn) [1870]

Camille Pissarro - Houses at Bougival (Autumn) [1870], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Within a few hundred yards of his home, Camille Pissarro (Charlotte Amalie, 1831 - Paris, 1903) painted a view of peasants working in a shady, wooded garden alongside a group of village houses. In the foreground, a woman carrying a bucket pauses to talk with a young boy carrying his school satchel over his shoulder. The gray sky and the trees losing their leaves indicate autumn. 

Painting in the open air alongside Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pissarro followed a new practice of breaking up surfaces with loosely placed brushstrokes. This revolutionary technique, the cornerstone of Impressionism, helps to reveal how light and movement affect the perception of objects. Pissarro made the canvas a field of textures and movement; the character of the brushstroke varies according to the texture and form of the object it describes. For example, the haystack is painted with straw-shaped brushstrokes, the leaves are suggested by jagged daubs of paint, and the stucco walls are depicted with broad, smooth strokes. [Oil on canvas, 35 x 45.625 inches]

Camille Pissarro - Quai Malaquais, Sunny Afternoon [1903]

Camille Pissarro - Quai Malaquais, Sunny Afternoon [1903], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Pissarro painted four scenes of the Quai Malaquais from the same spot. The largest and most significant of them is the present canvas. The view portrayed here has survived to the present day. Although active, the banks of the Seine were among the less noisy and congested transportation arteries of Paris. Looking out the window of his hotel to the cobblestone street running into the distance, Pissarro, a true Impressionist, was charmed by the mutability of everything that fell into his field of vision. But here, the motif of actual physical activity, in particular the motion of the carriages, is less important. Nevertheless, Pissarro, by various means, chiefly through the diagonals and curves in the composition, creates the sense of a dynamic Paris street at midday. At the same time it is noteworthy that the entire series is distinguished by the centralised, even stage-like nature of the arrangement. In the present picture, the canopies of the trees to the left and the corner of the building to the right frame this outdoor stage. This canvas was one of the artist's last works.

[Oil on canvas, 65.3 x 81.5 cm]

Camille Pissarro - The Avenue, Sydenham [1871]

Camille Pissarro - The Avenue, Sydenham [1871], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

This painting is among the largest that Pissarro is known to have painted in London during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1). These works mainly represent scenes in the area of Norwood where Pissarro stayed until June 1871. This work depicts a scene that is little changed today. The painting conveys the atmosphere of an early spring day, with oak trees coming into leaf against a soft blue sky. Technical analysis shows that the main outlines of the landscape were painted first and the figures added over the paint that had dried.

[Oil on canvas, 48 x 73 cm]

Camille Pissarro - View from Louveciennes [1869-70]

Camille Pissarro - View from Louveciennes [1869-70], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

This landscape was probably painted in the spring of 1870. The previous year Pissarro had moved from Pontoise to Louveciennes, west of Paris, where his friends Renoir and Monet were then active. The painting shows the village of Voisins in the centre and the road leading towards the remains of the Marly aqueduct on the left horizon.

[Oil on canvas, 52.7 x 81.9 cm]

Camille Pissarro - Fair in Dieppe, Sunny Morning [1901]

Camille Pissarro - Fair in Dieppe, Sunny Morning [1901], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

In 1901, Camille Pissarro settled in Dieppe in a small hotel room across from the Church of Saint-Jacques, a remarkable Gothic structure and the square, which from time immemorial had been used as a market. The series created in Dieppe in 1901 consists of seven canvases in which the artist discovered a way not only to convey the impression of busy town life, but to create an unusually integrated rhythmic structure through a flawlessly calculated interplay of geometric details.

[Oil on canvas, 65.3 x 81.5 cm]

Camille Pissarro - The Boulevard Montmartre at Night [1897]

Camille Pissarro - The Boulevard Montmartre at Night [1897], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Towards the end of his life Pissarro increasingly turned to the representation of town scenes in Paris, Rouen, Dieppe, Le Havre and London, mainly painted from the windows of hotels and apartments. In February 1897 he took a room in Paris at the Hôtel de Russie on the corner of the Boulevard des Italiens and the Rue Drouot, and produced a series of paintings of the Boulevard Montmartre at different times of the day. Pissarro may have been influenced by the series of paintings on which Monet was engaged at this time, and by the earlier urban scenes of Manet. This painting is the only night scene from this series, and is a masterful rendition of the play of lights on dark and wet streets. Pissarro neither signed nor exhibited it during his lifetime.

[Oil on canvas, 53.3 x 64.8 cm]

Camille Pissarro - Boulevard Monmartre in Paris [1897]

Camille Pissarro - Boulevard Monmartre in Paris [1897], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Like Claude Monet, Pissarro, an outstanding representative of the Impressionist movement, often painted whole series of works showing the same motif. This painting belongs to a series of views the Boulevard Montmartre, for which the artist rented a room in the Grand Hotel de Russie from which he could see all the "grands boulevards". Pissarro depicted this view at different hours of the day, in different weather conditions, creating a total of 13 paintings taken from the same viewpoint. Here the master skilfully conveyed the rich atmospheric effects, the complex colours and ethereal feeling of a gloomy day. This image of fast-moving, dynamic urban life, so convincingly captured by the artist's rapid brushwork, presents the image of a contemporary city - not in a ceremonial or official mood, but animated and alive. Such urban landscapes formed the central motif in Pissarro's work.

[Oil on canvas, 74 x 92.8 cm]

Camille Pissarro - Fox Hill, Upper Norwood [1870]

Towards the end of 1870 Pissarro and his family took refuge in England from the Franco-Prussian war. He stayed in Upper Norwood, London until June 1871, and painted several views of Norwood and Sydenham including this painting. Many of the houses in this street have been rebuilt but the general character of this view and the distinctive bend still correspond with Pissarro's painting. [Oil on canvas, 35.3 x 45.7 cm]

Camille Pissarro - The Rue de l’Hermitage, Pontoise [1873-75]

This watercolour is unique in Pissarro’s career, as it is the only watercolour depicting the rue de l'Hermitage, on which Pissarro lived with his family throughout much of the 1870s. Pissarro painted the street seven times, and one pencil drawing also survives. Neither the drawing nor the watercolour relates in any direct way to a painting, clearly indicating that for Pissarro in the early and mid-1870s each work of art was made independently, rather than in the traditional hierarchy of drawing, watercolour, oil sketch, and finished painting.

Stylistic evidence suggests that this watercolour was made in the early or mid-1870s, when Pissarro concentrated on street scenes with balanced architectural masses. The interplay of red, green, and blue and the contrast of large areas of white and dark give the work a visual strength that belies its small size. It was made in a medium that Pissarro used throughout his life but that, curiously, was without a particularly distinguished history in French art. The pencil initials at the lower right indicate that Pissarro himself considered this sheet to be finished.

[Watercolour, pencil, gouache on woven paper]

Camille Pissarro - Landscape in the Vicinity of Louveciennes, Autumn [1870]

Within a few hundred yards of his home, Camille Pissarro painted a view of peasants working in a shady, wooded garden alongside a group of village houses. In the foreground, a woman carrying a bucket pauses to talk with a young boy carrying his school satchel over his shoulder. The gray sky and the trees losing their leaves indicate autumn.

Painting in the open air alongside Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pissarro followed a new practice of breaking up surfaces with loosely placed brushstrokes. This revolutionary technique, the cornerstone of Impressionism, helps to reveal how light and movement affect the perception of objects. Pissarro made the canvas a field of textures and movement; the character of the brushstroke varies according to the texture and form of the object it describes. For example, the haystack is painted with straw-shaped brushstrokes, the leaves are suggested by jagged daubs of paint, and the stucco walls are depicted with broad, smooth strokes.

[Oil on canvas, 89.0 x 116.0 cm]