CAMILLE PISSARRO

A rich biography of the eminent artist of the belle epoque.

Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) was an outsider, a Jew born in the Caribbean who did not arrive in France until he was 25. As Muhlstein, author of Balzac’s Omelette and The Pen and the Brush, writes, he “saw himself as an interloper in French society.” Still, he was held in high esteem by other painters who were breaking away from the prevailing neoclassicism. He became a close friend of Monet, Cézanne, and Degas, a sometime supporter of Paul Gauguin who broke away only because he disliked “Gauguin’s obsession with selling his work.” On that score, Pissarro, an anarchist and bohemian to the core, was often destitute, supporting a gaggle of children with a loving and endlessly patient partner, capable of making a reasonable living from his art only in his 60s. There is some irony to the fact that although Pissarro organized the first of the salons where the “refused” impressionists exhibited their work and was regarded as the first among equals, his fame has been far eclipsed by his peers. Pissarro was also influential in admitting women such as Suzanne Valadon and Mary Cassatt into impressionist circles. As Muhlstein shows, the impressionists could be a querulous bunch, capable of falling out quickly. Pissarro was cast out for a time after he fell under the sway of pointillism and began to produce works in the style of Georges Seurat, another friend he recruited to join his neoimpressionist salons. For all his poverty, writes the author, Pissarro was inspiring enough, with an astonishing work ethic, that his surviving children all became artists—and artists predominate in the fifth generation of his descendants, long after his death.

A spirited life of a painter who deserves both reconsideration and admiration.