These are the 12 most famous paintings by Camille Pissarro. Born in 1830, as a young man, Camille Pissarro started to experiment with art, eventually assisting in shaping the Impressionist style with his friends, including Claude Monet and Edgar Degas. Pissarro became an Impressionist painter and printmaker and a member of the Post-Impressionist movement, being a major figure, till his death in Paris in 1903.
Biography of Camille Pizarro
Early Life
Pissarro is exceptional among the Impressionists, not least for his peripheral origin. Far away from Metropolitan France, where most of his peers were born, Pissarro was born in the Caribbean, on the island of St. Thomas, then a Danish possession. He was born to a lower-middle-class Jewish family with French roots.
His formative period consisted of the attendance of an all-black Protestant elementary school on St. Thomas, then a boarding school near Paris, and the acquaintance of the Dutch artist Fritz Melbye, the person who advised him to take up painting as a regular profession. Up until then, which is to say the age of twenty-one, Pissarro had worked as a port clerk who practiced drawing on the side. With Melbye, Pissarro also spent two years in Venezuela, where he sketched and painted the scenery, continuing a passion possibly acquired in St. Thomas.
Interest in painting
In Paris, like his soon-to-be-Impressionist contemporaries, Pissarro sought out great art teachers, like Gustave Courbet, and progressively developed a sense of disappointment at their schematic approach. Yet, thanks to the tutoring of such masters as Camille Corot, Camille Pissarro was able to express early his lifelong love of landscape in the correct Naturalist style and thus earn himself admission to the official Salon.
From 1859 Pissarro began to exhibit at this prestigious gallery. Besides exposure, for the struggling artist, a most desirable benefit of the Salon was the possibility of accomplishing a sale.
Despite his ostensibly growing mastery of the academic technique which could have been his fortune, Pissarro also cultivated his art independently from Corot. He traveled to the French countryside to paint en plein air, his favorite technique and setting, and to develop a personal approach. As a budding Impressionist, Pissarro captured the landscape before his eyes as if were about to vanish, operating on several registers at once and reserving the finishing stages for his studio.
Camille Pissarro’s inner circle of artists
Pissarro became friends with several artists of the upcoming Impressionist circle during the last stages of his formal education. He was an encouraging friend to Claude Monet, Armand Guillaumin, and Paul Cézanne; he then also became friendly with Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Frédéric Bazille.
The acquaintance of these artists led to the realization that they had all matured various dissatisfactions with the policy of the Salon and that they had all begun to consider en plein air painting as important. Pissarro’s personal stress of disagreement was towards the academic view that human subjects should be made to appear grand. On the contrary, he agreed with his peers that the truth about people could only be portrayed in natural and realistic settings.
Formation of The Impressionists
In 1863, when Emperor Napoleon III exercised his prerogative as an authority on art to relegate the rejects of the main Salon to a Salon des Refusés, the Impressionist group was informally brought together. These were the artists whose works were almost entirely rejected from the first Salon, while at the second, much-derided, Salon only Pissarro and Cézanne had won an admission.
By 1868 Camille Pissarro was presenting himself as an entirely independent artist by not crediting his masters anymore in the catalogues of his paintings. By the end of that decade, he had also become familiar with and fascinated by, Japanese prints, sharing thereby the enthusiasm of the Impressionist group for the newly discovered traditional iconographies of Japan.
When the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 broke out, Pissarro, like Monet, found refuge in London. While Monet was dodging the draft, Pissarro was simply staying away from the war as he could not, with only his Dutch citizenship, be recruited. An enormous number of paintings that Pissarro had left behind in Paris — amounting to hundreds of pieces — were destroyed in the war, chiefly by being used by the soldiers for materials.
Together with Monet in London, Pissarro made a study of the masterly landscapes of John Constable and J.M.W Turner. He also established contact with Paul Durand-Ruel, the art dealer who would enable both Pissarro and Monet to sell the occasional painting in their many years of financial strain.
Pissarro produced a multitude of oils portraying English scenery in between his several visits from 1870 to 1897.
The Father of the Impressionists
Immediately after the war, Pissarro emerged as the guiding figure of the Impressionist movement thanks in the main to his initiative and in part to his fatherly appearance.
He was instrumental in the creation of the Anonymous Society of Artists, Painters, Sculptors and Engravers in 1873. It was to be the organization that would set up the first Impressionist exhibition the following year. Pissarro even provided a baseline charter for this group of fifteen artists destined to collaborate for a very short period.
At the group’s effective dissolution after the last exhibition in 1886, Camille Pissarro was the only artist to have taken part in every one of them. And while most members of the Impressionist circle came to express some kind of public dislike of one another, Camille Pissarro seems to have been generally liked and appreciated. He was often described as considerate and unassuming.
Pissarro was also known for his willingness to teach other artists and give advice. The former Impressionists referred to him affectionately as ‘father Pissarro’. His son, Lucien Pissarro, wrote appreciatively of his artistic pupillage under him, and in 1884, by the mediation of his art dealer brother, the young Vincent van Gogh also came into contact with him and benefitted from his guidance and encouragement.
Pissarro, like the rest of the Impressionist set, had to weather the mostly negative public reception of their revolutionary style. Save for a few professional critics like Zola, the Impressionists were mostly deprecated. Pissarro’s own work was regularly indicted for the seeming unreality of his chromatic choices, which so clearly violated the accepted tenets of Realism.
Pissarro impact on Neo-Impressionism and Post-Impressionism
From the 1880s, with the various Impressionists taking different artistic paths, Camille Pissarro combined his love for the countryside and the peasant folk with his desire, to tell the truth about the life of people. His preferred subject in this period, depicted in a notably realistic and rounded-up fashion, are peasants at work in rural environments (see The Harvest, Pontoise, or Hay Harvest at Éragny).
In 1885, Pissarro met Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. This led him at once to study their laborious pointillistic technique, which he was proud to showcase at the last Impressionist exhibition the following year. His personal technical development was appreciated. Pissarro considered this extremely analytical, scientific approach to color a natural development of the Impressionist project. Such experiments were already being referred to as Neo-Impressionism, and they constituted a phase that, in Pissarro’s own telling, lasted four years in his case.
In his ultimate period, Pissarro synthesized his exceptional artistic trajectory in paintings grounded in the Impressionist idea, tempered with care for shape and fine detail, and always turned towards the reality of life.
Pissarro’s artwork enjoyed the same ironic fate as that of the other leading Impressionists. Having usually failed to fetch a good price while the artist was living, it went on to be sold in the 20th and the 21st century for exorbitant sums. In 2007, Pissarro’s Les Quatre Saison (1873) set a record for the artist by selling at no less than $14,601,000. In 2014, Le Boulevard de Montmartre (1897) overtopped that value by being purchased for over $26,300,000.
Famous Camille Pisarro Paintings
The Boulevard Montmartre at Night (1897)
The Boulevard Montmartre at Night is one of the most famous paintings by Camille Pissarro, depicting Paris’ bright fresh start as the center of European architecture and city planning after Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s famous city-wide reconstruction. This painting is a representation of a Parisian street, including all of its essential features. “The Boulevard Montmartre at Night” is widely regarded as the most famous night scene painting ever made.
The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning (1897)
This painting depicts the crowded Parisian boulevard, which is seen from Pissarro’s hotel room on the second floor. It was a cold winter morning, and people were out walking. “The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning” is a historical moment that captures the city’s increasing liveliness at the beginning of the 20th century. It gives the sense of a world constantly in motion.
Two Young Peasant Women (1881-1882)
This painting depicts two young peasant women taking a break from their work in an open field near Pissarro’s residence in Éragny. Although some brighter colors are used in certain places, the majority of the painting is in pastel colors. This is a hugely famous painting in the Impressionist style, where these workers dominate the landscape scene due to their size, position, grace, and dignity.
Portrait of Felix Pissarro (1881)
This is a portrait of Felix Pissarro, Pissarro’s third son, who was ordered to sit still for an extended period. Felix sat for several portraits of his father, but this is the most well-known. He went on to become a painter and cartoonist in his own right, working under the name Jean Roch.
Young Peasant at Her Toilette (1888)
This is a painting of a young woman standing and washing her long hair in a bathroom. “Young Peasant at Her Toilette” is painted in Pointillism and Neo-Impressionism styles. Small strokes or dots of color were applied to a surface in such a way that they mixed from a distance, which made the painting look interesting.
Self-Portrait with Hat (1903)
This is Pissarro’s fourth and final self-portrait, which he created in his Place Dauphine apartment, which overlooks the Pont Neuf. He presented himself as intelligent and mature, with a small attitude of power and control. “Self-Portrait with Hat” was painted using rapid and thick brushstrokes in a typical Impressionist style.
Entrance to the Village of Voisins (1872)
This is a painting of a view of Voisin’s, a village in Paris’s southwest suburbs. Trees are painted on both sides of the road, and a horse carrying a wagon is painted in the middle. As the leaves are not out, this shows a peaceful and beautiful spring day. This painting captures village life and sympathy for peasant life.
Peasants’ houses, Eragny (1887)
This is a painting of a peasant’s house in Eragny, France. “Peasants’ Houses, Eragny” is one of the few pointillist paintings created by Pissarro, who only utilized this style for about four years (1884–88). The artist’s style in the painting is evident in his use of bright colors to contrast light and shade.
Sunset at Eragny (1890)
One of the more famous paintings by Camille Pissarro, this picture depicts a flat landscape with a low horizon, a row of trees, and a sky tinted yellow by the sun’s last rays. The trees are the main subject of the painting. The actual green of the trees can be seen in the horizontal shadows created on the ground in front of them. This was one of Pissarro’s late landscape paintings.
Apple-Picking (1886)
This is a painting of three women picking apples under the shade of a tree. This painting was created during the neo-impressionist movement. It provides a structure in which the entire view is clearly seen from an angle that covers the sky. There are three different paintings of this same subject.
Bath Road, Chiswick (1897)
This is a painting of a newly constructed garden suburb in Bath Road, Chiswick, London, where Camille and her husband Lucien resided while he was recovering from a stroke. Their daughters, Esther and Orovida, were playing in front of the garden. This is an unfinished painting, particularly in the foreground. Several paintings were made of the front and back of the house where they resided in Bath Road.
Hay Harvest at Éragny (1901)
This artwork depicts women harvesting in the French village of Éragny on the River Epte. Pissarro’s placement of the women creates a feeling of rhythm and continuity in the foreground of the painting. Rather than being a landscape, the painting’s focus is on women agricultural laborers, which is comparable to Van Gogh’s painting “The Potato Eaters.”
What famous paintings by Camille Pissarro do you think we should add to this list? Comment below.