Artist Dossier: Camille Pissarro

Artist Dossier: Camille Pissarro

Courtesy Christie's

Artist Dossier: Camille Pissarro

For graphic analysis of Pissarro's market, click here.

Edgar Degas Claude Monet Camille Pissarro Paul Cezanne Paul Gauguin Georges Seurat Paul Signac Vasarely’s Victory

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We learned everything we do from Pissarro,” Paul Cezanne once remarked to the French poet Joachim Gasquet. “He told me never to paint with anything other than the three primary colors and their immediate derivatives. It’s he who was really the first Impressionist.” Indeed, Camille Pissarro, who was born in the Virgin Islands in 1830 and settled permanently in France in 1855 after rejecting the bourgeois confines of his family’s dry-goods business, is widely recognized as the father of Impressionism. The only one among his circle to participate in all eight of the Impressionist exhibitions held from 1874 to 1886, Pissarro profoundly influenced the movement in the way he conveyed the sensations of nature in different atmospheric conditions and through his close collaborations with Monet, Gauguin, Degas, Seurat and Cezanne, among others.

His friendship with the last artist was intimately explored in “Pioneering Modern Painting: Cezanne and Pissarro 1865–1885” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2005. The show was curated by Joachim Pissarro, the painter’s great-grandson, who spent 23 years working on Pissarro’s catalogue raisonné, published that same year by the Wildenstein Institute. The exhibition positioned the artist as both mentor and equal to Cezanne over their 20-year relationship. The two were particularly close in the 1870s, when they worked side by side painting the scenery around the villages of Pontoise and Auvers, not far from where they lived. “I discovered that Camille Pissarro was a much more complex and interesting artist than I was prepared to think,” says Joachim Pissarro, an adjunct curator at MoMA and director of Hunter College Galleries, in New York, who had little interest in his relative before being asked to work on the catalogue raisonné. He posits that Cezanne—just before inventing his signature style of parallel hatchings, in the early 1880s—was energized by Pissarro’s work from 1867. That was the year the Salon rejected Pissarro’s stark, rough landscape submission, inflaming his rebellious nature.

Following up on MoMA’s reassessment of the artist are two current exhibitions. On view at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art through January 6 is “Pissarro: Creating the Impressionist Landscape,” which focuses on his innovative early works, from 1864 to 1874, the year he played a seminal role organizing the first Impressionist show. At the Jewish Museum in New York through February 3 is “Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country,” drawn largely from private collections such as those of Deanne and Arthur Indursky, Adele and Herbert Klapper, and Bruce and Robbi Toll. The show juxtaposes the painter’s landscapes—including works from the late 1880s in which he was experimenting with Pointillism, based on the color theories of Seurat and Signac—and the vibrant cityscapes that he concentrated on from the 1890s until his death in 1903. These shows are refocusing attention on Pissarro, who—while a mainstay of the Impressionist auctions—hasn’t had the marquee name or commanded the prices of some of his contemporaries.

“Pissarro’s market is incredibly undervalued,” says Guy Bennett, head of Impressionist and modern art at Christie’s. “On the whole, the artist’s price range at auction is between $1 million and $4 million, which is remarkable, considering where some of our other artists are selling and how influential Pissarro was. Our clients have realized that, and that’s why you’ve seen this increase in his price point.”

This awareness is reflected in Pissarro’s new auction record of $14.6 million, set this past November at Christie’s New York. It was achieved by his suite of four paintings of the seasons, “Les quatre saisons,” 1872–73, which also held the previous record of just under $9 million, set at Christie’s in 2004. Three other single landscapes at the November sale inspired lively bidding as well, including Les peupliers, apres-midi a Eragny, 1899, which went for $5.4 million.