Camille Pissarro

Description

From the acclaimed biographer and author of Balzac’s Omelette, an engaging new work on the life of “the father of Impressionism” and the role his Jewish background played in his artistic creativity.

The celebrated painter Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) occupied a central place in the artistic scene of his time: a founding member of the new school of French painting, he was a close friend of Monet, a longtime associate in Degas’s and Mary Cassatt’s experimental work, a support to Cézanne and Gauguin, and a comfort to Van Gogh, and was backed by the great Parisian art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel throughout his career. Nevertheless, he felt a persistent sense of being set apart, different, and hard to classify. Settled in France from the age of twenty-five but born in the Caribbean, he was not French and what is more he was Jewish. Although a resolute atheist who never interjected political or religious messages in his art, he was fully aware of the consequences of his lineage.

Drawing on Pissarro’s considerable body of work and a vast collection of letters that show his unrestrained thoughts, Anka Muhlstein offers a nuanced, intimate portrait of the artist whose independent spirit fostered an environment of freedom and autonomy.“Cézanne hailed him as the first Impressionist, and from these pages Pissarro certainly emerges as the most beguiling. Faced with every manner of obstacle—from financial woes to anti-Semitism to the destruction of his paintings during the Paris Commune to an inhospitable art world—Pissarro held his own, ceaselessly experimenting with new subjects and styles. Anka Muhlstein has done him proud. Lithe, incisive, and sparkling, this is a model biography.” —Stacy Schiff, author of Cleopatra: A Life and The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“On rare occasions, a biography introduces you to an artist whose life reminds you of all the joy and beauty on offer to those who seek them, along with all the hardship the seeker must transcend. Camille Pissarro is such a character, and Anka Muhlstein’s exquisite portrait of him is such a revelation.” —Judith Thurman, National Book Award–winning author of Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller

“With the skill only a master biographer can muster, Anka Muhlstein paints a portrait of a beloved artist as you have never seen him before. Pissarro emerges at the crossroads of identities and experiences, a true man of the world. The book is remarkable for Muhlstein’s trademark depth of scholarship, but most of all for her depth of insight.” —James McAuley, author of The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France

“Anka Muhlstein’s life of Pissarro is a story about devotion. We see the young man travel from his native Saint Thomas in the Caribbean and create himself as a French painter in the shared adventure of Impressionism, holding fast to his vision through poverty, vilification, and family sorrow. A noble tale of art and friendship, in Muhlstein’s telling, as dappled and subtle as Pissarro’s own paintings. When I reached the final pages, my heart was full.” —Rosanna Warren, author of Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters

“Here is life-writing at its most vivid and engrossing. Pissarro emerges as heroic in his artistic dedication and collegial generosity—a patriarch and saint among the painters of modern life. Muhlstein’s portrait pulses with all the particulars of a mighty life and career. Her Pissarro is irresistible.” —Benjamin Taylor, author of Proust: The Search

“Muhlstein deftly traces the life of Camille Pissarro from its Caribbean origins to Paris and the turbulent center of radical Impressionism. Drawing on the artist’s correspondence, she illuminates with acute sensitivity his Jewish background, long years of struggle and loss, equanimity, devotion to family, constant work—as well as his extraordinary artistry and role as father figure to his younger Impressionist friends.” —Susan Grace Galassi, coauthor of Picasso’s Drawings, 1890–1921: Reinventing Tradition

“The ‘father of Impressionism’—Camille Pissarro—emerges from this intimate account, written largely from his correspondence, as a dedicated and independent artist and a great-hearted man. Anka Muhlstein has written a fine, fast-paced, readable account of a crucial figure in cultural history.” —Peter Brooks, author of Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative and Balzac’s LivesAnka Muhlstein is the author of biographies of Queen Victoria, James de Rothschild, and Cavelier de La Salle; studies on Catherine de Médicis, Marie de Médicis, and Anne of Austria; a double biography, Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart; Balzac’s Omelette (Other Press, 2011), Monsieur Proust’s Library (Other Press, 2015), and The Pen and the Brush (Other Press, 2017). She won the Goncourt Prize for her biography of Astolphe de Custine, and has received two prizes from the Académie française. She and her husband, Louis Begley, are the authors of Venice for Lovers. They live in New York City.

Adriana Hunter studied French and Drama at the University of London. She has translated more than ninety books, including Marc Petitjean’s The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris and Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly and Eléctrico W, winner of the French-American Foundation’s 2013 Translation Prize in Fiction. She lives in Kent, England.Introduction
 
Camille Pissarro was a most unusual man. Granted, most artists are, but Pissarro knew that he was even more out of step with the France of his day than his peers. “I have a rustic, melancholy temperament, I look coarse and wild,” he acknowledged. Later, he added, “too serious to appeal to the masses and too distant from exotic tradition to be understood by dilettantes. I am too surprising, I break away too often from accepted behavior.” Settled in France from the age of twenty­-five but born in the Caribbean, he was not French, and what is more he was Jewish. He never hid this fact and knew that it was not without significance. He saw himself as an interloper in French society even though he was a founding member of the new school of French painting, was affectionately nicknamed the father of Impressionism by his peers, was a close friend of Monet, a longtime associate in Degas’s and Cassatt’s experimental work, a support to Cézanne and Gauguin, and a comfort to Van Gogh, and was backed throughout his career by the great Parisian art dealer Paul Durand-­Ruel. Nevertheless, a sense of being set apart, different, and hard to classify persisted, and this is what drew me to Pissarro.

He portrayed himself four times in thirty years, and his self­-portraits help us form an impression of his gravi­tas, his calm, and the intensity of his gaze, but he also left a fifth portrait, a more detailed, more complex, and often unexpected one, the portrait constituted by his cor­respondence. Reading a person’s correspondence is a little like eavesdropping. We are breaking and entering into the intimate world of someone who has let their guard down. The more sustained the exchange, the more personal it is, and the deeper and more nuanced the letter writer’s self­-portrait becomes.

Camille Pissarro left a vast accumulation of letters, most of which were brought together in five volumes and edited by Janine Bailly­-Herzberg. Although not exhaus­tive, these volumes are certainly enough to give an idea of a painter’s life in the nineteenth century and, more spe­cifically, of the audacity of the Impressionist adventure. But what I found most interesting about this correspondence was the self­-portrait that emerges from it. Given that most of Pissarro’s letters are to his children, the tone is utterly unconstrained. Pissarro did not use the familiar tu form when addressing his fellow painters, even those he had known as a student. He always showed his peers a courtesy not far removed from reserve, but abandoned all restraint particularly in his exchanges with his eldest son. The question of religion recurs frequently over the pages. During a period of despondency, this resolute atheist ad­mits that his origins have left their mark on him: “To date, no Jew in this country has produced art, or rather heart­felt, disinterested art, I think that this could be one of the reasons I’m having no luck.”

This is a curious remark insofar as he never inter­jected political or religious messages in his art. He good­ naturedly admitted that for a Hebrew he was far from biblical. He felt that painting should be neither literary or historical, nor political or social, but only the expression of a feeling. The fact remains, though, that he was fully conscious of the consequences of his lineage. He confesses to sometimes feeling like an outsider in France. Being not only Jewish but also foreign necessitated a degree of cau­tion that did not come naturally to him. This man who consistently demonstrated bravery in his artistic choices, who was never slow to develop or change his style, or to admit his mistakes, without ever giving way to the pres­sures of public demand; this man whose personal life was characterized by an absolute refusal to accept family or social conventions; this man still knew he must never openly take part in the political battles of his time. The threat of expatriation enforced on him a reserve that he never waived. Being very sensitive to social injustice, he did whatever was within his means to support anarchist publications but never made public Les Turpitudes sociales (Social turpitudes), a series of striking caricatures about suffering among the working class. And, although he openly sided with the Dreyfusards, he did not play such an active role in their struggle as did many of his peers, in­cluding Eugène Carrière, Edouard Vuillard, and the Swiss Félix Vallotton.

All his energy was concentrated into his art, his chil­dren’s artistic education, and the fight to have modern art recognized. He was exceptionally hardworking and left a considerable body of work—more than fifteen hun­dred oils, not to mention the pastels, watercolors, and drawings—as well as being a gifted teacher whose four sons all went on to be respected artists. He had a tremen­dous talent for attracting and working closely with artists as diverse as Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin, Signac, and Seurat. Whenever the opportunity arose, he refused to comply with the demands of official art, and he alone with Degas participated in every Impressionist exhibition, serenely braving the insults and jeers because he was convinced of the validity of his experimental work.

Perhaps it fell to him, with his particularly indepen­dent spirit, to adopt a system that encouraged freedom and autonomy. “Make your plans with no rules, or at least with none that you find offensive,” he advised his son. With this he was arguing for a new tradition, a modern one that granted artists the ability to invent, to keep re­evaluating their own work, and to justify their reputation as “fierce revolutionar[ies].”US

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