- Person
- Camille Pissarro
- Lived
- 1830–1903
- Field
- Impressionist painting
- From
- Danish-French
The story
When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, Camille Pissarro, who held Danish nationality and could not join the French army, took his family to Upper Norwood, then a village on the edge of London. In 1871 he married his partner, Julie Vellay, in Croydon. The months in England were anxious and poor; he wrote to his friend Théodore Duret that his painting was not catching on at all. But the stay proved important for his art.
He painted the newly built suburbs of south London, recording Sydenham and the Norwoods just after the railways reached them and before the spread of suburbia. Twelve oil paintings survive from his stay, including Lordship Lane Station, Dulwich, a view of a suburban railway station opened only six years earlier, Lower Norwood Under Snow, views of the Crystal Palace, Dulwich College and the churches of the area, and The Avenue, Sydenham, now in the National Gallery in London.
In London Pissarro met the Paris art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. Durand-Ruel became the dealer who sold Pissarro's work for most of his life and the great champion of the Impressionists, and he put Pissarro back in touch with Claude Monet, also a refugee in London. Together the two painters studied the landscapes of John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. Turner's treatment of light and atmosphere confirmed their belief that painting in the open air gave the truest picture of nature, and Lordship Lane Station may have been inspired by Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed, then on display at the National Gallery. Pissarro's own work became looser and more spontaneous.
Pissarro returned to England several times. In 1890 he painted about ten scenes of central London, in 1892 he painted Kew Gardens and Kew Green, and in 1897 he painted around Stamford Brook in west London, where his son Lucien had settled.
Several of these pictures now hang in British museums, and together they form a record of London's suburbs at a moment of rapid change.
Why it matters
Pissarro's London years strengthened the link between British landscape painting and French Impressionism and left fine early pictures of the growing city.
About Camille Pissarro
Caribbean-born Jewish painter, the ‘dean’ of Impressionism, the only artist in all eight Impressionist exhibitions and a mentor to Cézanne, Gauguin and others.
More about Camille Pissarro
- Camille Pissarro began again after losing 1,500 paintingsWhen Camille Pissarro returned from England after the Franco-Prussian War, only about 40 of the 1,500 paintings he had left behind survived. He started again.
- Camille Pissarro painted Paris from his windowUnable to paint outdoors because of an eye infection, Camille Pissarro painted from hotel windows, creating his celebrated 1897 views of the Boulevard Montmartre.
- Camille Pissarro drafted the Impressionists' charterIn 1873 Camille Pissarro helped create the artists' cooperative whose 1874 show launched Impressionism, and he drafted the group's first charter.
- Camille Pissarro's letters to his son became an art classicCamille Pissarro's letters to his son Lucien, published in English in 1943, remain a key source on how the Impressionists thought and worked.
- Camille Pissarro was a pioneering Impressionist printmakerCamille Pissarro experimented with etching, lithography, woodcut and monotype, becoming one of the most dedicated printmakers among the Impressionists.
- Camille Pissarro stood up for Alfred DreyfusCamille Pissarro was convinced of Alfred Dreyfus's innocence by 1897 and in 1898 added his name to the intellectuals' petition backing Émile Zola.
Sources
- Camille Pissarro Wikipedia
- Lordship Lane Station, Dulwich Wikipedia
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