A lot is going on in France this summer. Normandy marked the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion in June. Paris is hosting the summer Olympics and is also celebrating the 150th anniversary of the exhibition that gave birth to Impressionism. In honor of that artistic milestone, the Musée d’Orsay mounted an ambitious exhibition, “Paris 1874—Inventing impressionism,” which was on display through July 14. But fear not, you’ll soon have an opportunity to see the exhibition on this side of the pond.
The show was organized along with Washington, DC’s National Gallery of Art and will be on view there from September 8, 2024, to January 19, 2025. Titled “Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment,” the exhibit will showcase some 130 paintings and will juxtapose works that appeared in that first Impressionist exhibit in 1874 with paintings displayed at the official Salon—the influential annual art exhibition of Paris’s Acadèmie des Beaux-Arts—that same year. The show also explores the featured artists’ responses to a city rebounding from the trauma of the Franco-Prussian war and political and social turmoil.
The first Impressionist exhibition opened in Paris on April 15, 1874, at 35 boulevard des Capucines, the studio of photographer Felix Nadar. The show, which marked a pivotal moment in the development of modernist painting, featured the work of a group of 30 artists, among them Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Alfred Sisley, Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro. The exhibition was organized by the Société Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs, a cooperative founded for the express purpose of pursuing artistic expression unimpeded by the official art establishment. The show was historic in that, unlike the Salon—with its Academy-approved mythological, religious and historical paintings—there was no jury.
One of the five paintings Pissarro chose to display in the first Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, Chestnut Trees at Osny, from 1873, reflects the Impressionists’ interest in how light influences colors. It’s loose brushwork, bright palette and play of light and shadow are also hallmarks of Impressionism. (Photo credit: Private Collection)
Participants alone decided which of their works they wanted to display. What united these artists, in addition to their dissatisfaction with the constraints of the Salon, was a desire to record the contemporary world around them by capturing the elusive effects of light and color. Shunning traditional composition and modeling techniques, they focused instead on texture, tone and color.
The reaction to the exhibition was, to say the least, mixed. More than 50 articles, some expressing outrage, others praise, were penned about the event. Louis Leroy, one of the exhibition’s harsher critics, coined the term “impressionists” in response to Monet’s painting Impression, Sunrise, which was featured in the show. The name, originally intended as derisive, stuck.
Orchard in Bloom, Louveciennes, 1872. (Photo credit: National Gallery of Art, Washington)
The oldest member of the group was Danish-French artist Camille Pissarro. By all accounts wise and kind-hearted, he was like a father to many of the artists. In the early 1870s he had discussed the idea of creating an alternative to the Salon with his friends Monet and Renoir, and helped in 1873 to found the Société Anonyme. Referred to as the “father of Impressionism” by many of his colleagues, he played a key role in encouraging and holding the group together. Art historian and Impressionist scholar John Rewald called him the “dean of the Impressionist painters” and Renoir referred to his work as “revolutionary.” As for Pissarro himself, author Anka Muhlstein quotes one of his letters in her 2023 biography, Camille Pissarro, the Audacity of Impressionism: “I have a rustic, melancholy temperament,” he wrote. “I look coarse and wild…too serious to appeal to the masses and too distant from exotic tradition to be understood by dilettantes. I am too surprising, I break away too often from accepted behavior.”
Hoarfrost, 1873. Both of these paintings by Pissarro were included in the first Impressionist exhibition. A sense of atmosphere and light permeates the works, which were painted out of doors directly from nature. (Photo credit: Musee d’Orsay, Paris)
Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro was born in 1830 on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, then under Danish rule, now part of the U.S. Virgin Islands. His mother, Rachel Pomié Manzana, was a Sephardic Jew born in St. Thomas. His father, Frédérick Abraham Gabriel Pissarro, was a French citizen of Portuguese Jewish heritage. Descendants of Jews who had fled Spain during the Inquisition had first arrived on St. Thomas from Denmark in the mid-17th century. Over the following centuries, a Jewish community thrived in the capital city of Charlotte Amalie. A congregation was founded there in 1796 and a synagogue was built in 1803, then rebuilt in 1833. Now a U.S. National Historic landmark, it is the third oldest synagogue in the Western hemisphere.
Frederick Pissarro had come to St. Thomas to settle the estate of his recently deceased uncle. He soon fell in love with his uncle’s widow, who was not only his aunt but also still nursing her youngest child. Marriage, according to Jewish law, was thus forbidden. The local synagogue would not marry them, and when they arranged a Jewish ceremony on their own, it would not recognize the marriage. It took eight years and the intervention of the Danish king for the synagogue to relent. The couple had four sons; Camille was the third.
When Camille was 12, his father sent him to boarding school in France. He studied at the Savary Academy near Paris, where he acquired a strong foundation in drawing and painting. Upon returning to St. Thomas at age 17, he went to work in the family hardware business, but he always made time to draw. At 21, he was inspired by Fritz Melbye, a Danish artist living in St. Thomas, to turn to painting as a profession.
In 1855, Pissarro moved back to Paris, where he worked as an assistant to painter Anton Melbye, Fritz Melbye’s brother, and studied paintings by other artists whose style he admired—Gustave Courbet, Jean-François Millet and French landscape and portrait artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He also took classes at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Suisse, but ultimately sought instruction from Corot, with whom he shared a love of painting everyday rural scenes. It was Corot who inspired Pissarro to paint out of doors, en plein air. Striving for an authentic representation of light and atmosphere and intent on preserving his first impression of a scene, Pissarro liked to complete his paintings out of doors, often in one sitting. He preferred to work on all the elements of a scene simultaneously and to keep reworking the painting until he felt it was right. According to Muhlstein, Pissarro “felt that painting should be neither literary or historical, nor political or social, but only the expression of a feeling.” He displayed five of his works in the 1874 show—all of them loosely brushed landscapes that captured the specific light and impression of the moment.
Pissarro’s parents relocated to Paris around 1860, and it was then that he met and fell in love with his mother’s kitchen maid, Julie Vellay. When Pissarro told his parents they intended to marry, both Rachel and Frédérick objected—not only was Julie from a working-class background, she was a Catholic. Pissarro’s mother, in fact, never entirely accepted the union or Julie. Nonetheless, the couple moved in together and Julie soon gave birth to the first of their eight children (only six survived to adulthood—all became artists). Despite the lack of approval and numerous difficulties—financial worries, antisemitism, family deaths and the destruction of many of Pissarro’s paintings by soldiers occupying his home during the Franco-Prussian war—their marriage endured.
According to Anka Muhlstein’s 2023 biography, the question of religion appears frequently in the numerous letters Pissarro left. “During a period of despondency,” writes Muhlstein, “this resolute atheist admits that his origins have left their mark on him: ‘To date,’ he wrote, ‘no Jew in this country has produced art, or rather heartfelt, disinterested art, I think that this could be one of the reasons I’m having no luck.’” He also confessed in letters to sometimes feeling like an outsider in France. “Being not only Jewish but also foreign,” Muhlstein writes, “necessitated a degree of caution that did not come naturally to him.”
Although Pissarro was backed throughout his career by the Parisian art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, he was constantly struggling to achieve financial and critical success. It was only after his death that his work started selling for substantial prices. His dedication to painting directly from nature and depicting the specific effects of light and weather on his subjects made him a central figure and driving force in the Impressionist movement. He was, in fact, the only one of the 30 original artists to participate in all eight of the Impressionist exhibitions. His work had a profound influence on many artists, from Monet and Sisley to Cézanne, who billed himself as “a pupil” of Pissarro and lauded him as the “first Impressionist.”
Mulstein relates that Matisse once asked Pissarro what an Impressionist was. “An Impressionist is the artist who paints a different picture every time,” Pissarro replied, “a painter who never produces the same picture twice.”