Pissarro by Nathalia Brodskaya

Author:Nathalia Brodskaya [Brodskaya, Nathalia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781606322
Publisher: Parkstone International

29. Half-Length Portrait of Lucien Pissarro, c.1875.

Watercolour and charcoal on paper, 28.3 x 23.5 cm.

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

30. Peasant Untangling Wool, 1875.

Oil on canvas, 55 x 46 cm.

E. G. Bührle Collection, Zurich.

Pissarro was convinced of the need for his group of friends to carve out an independent niche. Among the future Impressionists he was one of the most courageous. “You are right, my friend, we are beginning to have an impact,” he wrote to Théodore Duret in February 1873, “we are being strongly challenged by some of the established masters, but should these differences of opinion come as any surprise, when one arrives, uninvited, and plants one’s modest flag in the middle of the fracas? (…) We hope to forge ahead without concern for the opinions of others” (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 36). In 1874 Pissarro took an active part in organising their first exhibition. During discussions over its organization he insisted on the need for creating a cooperative. As an example he proposed the bylaws of the bakers’ union, which he had learned of in Pontoise. He also proposed a system in which each of the painters would be well positioned when the time came to hang the paintings. To avoid conflicts Pissarro thought it necessary to determine by lot where each painting would be hung. But all these proposals were rejected: they seemed too radical to the other painters.

Pissarro’s ideas during the discussions about the exhibition emerged from his continuing interest in the social aspects of life. Pissarro remained poor in spite of relentless, determined work, and in his situation he felt himself the equal of the peasants he saw working hard in Pointoise and other villages nearby. This also goes far to explain why Pissarro was the only one among the group of Impressionists to inherit Millet’s rural motifs. Peasants appear in his landscapes at work and at rest. In 1873 the critic Théodore Duret, a great friend of Pissarro’s, wrote to the painter that he had bought his landscape with three donkeys and a little shepherdess. The critic said it made no difference to him how the work was painted, with a light or dark palette, because all that made no real difference: in terms of the intensity of feeling, this landscape was as wonderful as a painting by Millet. The comparison with Millet was no accident: Pissarro had at one point seriously intended to take up genre painting. In 1874 he wrote to Théodore Duret that he was going to leave the forest, where he had been staying an entire month, and return to Pontoise. He said he had already started to depict people and animals, and had done a few genre paintings. But he felt timid and uncomfortable in this style. Since his youth he had worked at nurturing the landscape painter within him, and had some success in this: it was also the genre to which all his friends were devoting themselves. For a certain time Pissarro was very interested in

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