- Person
- Camille Pissarro
- Lived
- 1830–1903
- Field
- Impressionist painting
- From
- Danish-French
The story
Most people know the Impressionists through their paintings, but Camille Pissarro was also a tireless printmaker. Over his career he made a large body of prints, experimenting with lithographs, woodblock engravings, original techniques in multicolour etching, and monotype, in which a single image is painted on a plate and printed once. The art historian Cora Michael has called him perhaps the most devoted printmaker of all the Impressionists.
He treated printmaking not as a way to reproduce his paintings but as a medium of its own, approaching prints as an avant-garde artist. He reworked plates through many states and tested different inks and papers to capture effects of rain, wind and light. In the 1880s and early 1890s he worked with many print media in his studio at Pontoise, producing works such as Vegetable Market at Pontoise and The Road to Rouen: The Hills of Pontoise, and his prints of markets, fields and peasants at work became a central part of his art.
In the late 1870s Pissarro, Edgar Degas and the American painter Mary Cassatt planned a journal of their own original prints. The project collapsed when Degas withdrew, but it shows how seriously the three took the medium, and the shared work deepened a friendship built on both artistic and ethical common ground. Cassatt later said Pissarro was such a teacher that he could have taught the stones to draw correctly.
Printmaking also suited his convictions. Pissarro held strong egalitarian and anarchist views, and in 1889 he made Turpitudes sociales, an album of 30 drawings in the style of caricature criticising the injustices of modern society. His son Lucien carried the family's devotion to the printed image to England, becoming a wood engraver and founding the Eragny Press, which produced finely illustrated books from 1894 to 1914.
Pissarro's prints are held by major museums, and his experiments helped establish printmaking as a serious art form for modern painters rather than a means of reproduction.
Why it matters
Pissarro's experiments helped establish printmaking as a serious art form for modern painters and influenced the print revival that followed.
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.
- In London Pissarro studied Constable and TurnerAs a refugee in London in 1870–71, Camille Pissarro painted the city's suburbs, studied Constable and Turner with Monet, and met the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel.
- 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
- Lucien Pissarro Wikipedia
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