Works by Camille Pissarro
396 works · 139 ms
Camille Pissarro painted French villages, fields and farm workers as he found them, ruts, mud and straggling bushes included, often finishing a canvas outdoors in a single sitting.
He was born on St Thomas, then in the Danish West Indies, where the painter Fritz Melbye spurred him at twenty-one to take up art full time. A Creek in St. Thomas, signed in Paris in 1856, is smooth and glowing: palms, pink cliffs at sundown, a figure with a long stick on the shore. In The Red Roofs, painted at Pontoise in 1877, the village shows through bare trees, the paint laid on thickly in reds, greens and cream.
At Éragny-sur-Epte, his home from 1884, the house, orchard and fields became his subjects. In 1885 he drew close to Seurat and Signac and tried their small dots of fairly pure colour; in The House of the Deaf Woman and the Belfry at Eragny of 1886 grass, trees and sky are all built of them. By the end of the decade he found the method too tight and dropped it. He was perhaps the keenest printmaker among the Impressionists, and his colour etching of a church and farm at Éragny sets cows grazing under streaks of pink and yellow.
Most of the works below are paintings, landscapes and figures above all. Later a recurring eye infection let him work outside only in warm weather, so he painted Rouen, Le Havre, Dieppe and Paris from hotel windows. In The Boulevard Montmartre at Night of 1897 shop fronts and street lamps are thick yellow dabs under a dark blue sky.
Sources: Wikipedia, Musée d'Orsay, Indianapolis Museum of Art, National Gallery, National Gallery of Art.
