Art: PISSARRO: Impressionable Impressionist

IN the 1880’s when rotund Camille Pissarro walked into Paris’ Cafe de la Nouvelle Athenes with his great prophet’s beard streaming and his portfolio tucked under his arms, fellow artists would greet him with a shout, “Hail to Moses!” In fact, good-natured, soft-spoken Painter Pissarro’s place in art was far more that of teacher, peacemaker and counselor than lawgiver. He was ten years older than most of the impressionist greats, and this induced in him a fatherly urge to take time off from his own painting to patch up quarrels, round up shows, hold together the impressionists as a group. Because he remained in the midstream of the art movements of his day. experimenting with each new movement and sponsoring innovations, his works lacked the distinctive quality that makes his contemporaries, Degas, Monet, Manet, Renoir and Cezanne, recognizable at a glance.

The current showing of in of Pissarro’s works staged by the painter’s old gallery, Durand-Ruel. the first major Pissarro show in Paris for 30-odd years, goes far to clear and enhance Pissarro’s reputation. He was the most impressionable of the impressionists, a painter who influenced a host of painters from Cezanne to Van Gogh and Gauguin, then had the sensitivity and malleability to be influenced by them in turn. The full sweep of Pissarro’s lifetime output, ranging from an early landscape done in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, where he was born in 1830 (into a mixed French-Portuguese-Jewish family), to his self-portrait done the year he died in 1903, leaves little doubt that, experimentation aside, Pissarro was one of the ablest and most dedicated of France’s 19th century painters.

Gauguin, who made his break into art under Pissarro’s tutelage, said in later years: “He looked at everybody, you say! Why not? Everyone looked at him, too, but denied him. He was one of my masters, and I do not deny him.” “Perhaps we all come from Pissarro,” added Cezanne, who early worked under him.

Pissarro’s claim to recognition lies in such paintings as Peasant Digging (see opposite). A realist at heart, he followed Corot’s advice always to paint out of doors. Pissarro made no effort to turn the young peasant woman into a monumental symbol, but accepted her as part of the landscape. His real joy, as his broad brush strokes show, was in catching on the spot the midday heat and glitter of the sun.

“We are far from being understood—quite far—even by our friends,” Pissarro confided to his son toward the end of his life. In his day he was reconciled to receiving $500 for a painting. But since then, the boom in impressionist paintings has far surpassed his wildest imaginings. Today Paris art dealers get $15,000 for a small Pissarro oil. The estimated value of Peasant Digging is $25,000. In a way,

Pissarro might not have been surprised. Belatedly, perhaps, he has been found right in believing, as he once wrote: “When you put all your soul into a work, all that is noble in you, you cannot fail to find a kindred spirit who understands you.”