Camille Pissarro: The Audacity of Impressionism

PRAISE FOR CAMILLE PISSARRO

Cézanne hailed him as the first Impressionist, and from these pages Pissarro certainly emerges as the most beguiling. Faced with every manner of obstacle—from financial woes to anti-Semitism to the destruction of his paintings during the Paris Commune to an inhospitable art world—Pissarro held his own, ceaselessly experimenting with new subjects and styles. Anka Muhlstein has done him proud. Lithe, incisive, and sparkling, this is a model biography.

—Stacy Schiff, author of Cleopatra: A Life and The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

On rare occasions, a biography introduces you to an artist whose life reminds you of all the joy and beauty on offer to those who seek them, along with all the hardship the seeker must transcend. Camille Pissarro is such a character, and Anka Muhlstein’s exquisite portrait of him is such a revelation.

—Judith Thurman, National Book Award–winning author of Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller

With the skill only a master biographer can muster, Anka Muhlstein paints a portrait of a beloved artist as you have never seen him before. Pissarro emerges at the crossroads of identities and experiences, a true man of the world. The book is remarkable for Muhlstein’s trademark depth of scholarship, but most of all for her depth of insight.

—James McAuley, author of The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France

Anka Muhlstein’s life of Pissarro is a story about devotion. We see the young man travel from his native Saint Thomas in the Caribbean and create himself as a French painter in the shared adventure of Impressionism, holding fast to his vision through poverty, vilification, and family sorrow. A noble tale of art and friendship, in Muhlstein’s telling, as dappled and subtle as Pissarro’s own paintings. When I reached the final pages, my heart was full.

—Rosanna Warren, author of Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters

Here is life-writing at its most vivid and engrossing. Pissarro emerges as heroic in his artistic dedication and collegial generosity—a patriarch and saint among the painters of modern life. Muhlstein’s portrait pulses with all the particulars of a mighty life and career. Her Pissarro is irresistible.

—Benjamin Taylor, author of Proust: The Search

Muhlstein deftly traces the life of Camille Pissarro from its Caribbean origins to Paris and the turbulent center of radical Impressionism. Drawing on the artist’s correspondence, she illuminates with acute sensitivity his Jewish background, long years of struggle and loss, equanimity, devotion to family, constant work—as well as his extraordinary artistry and role as father figure to his younger Impressionist friends.

—Susan Grace Galassi, coauthor of Picasso’s Drawings, 1890–1921: Reinventing Tradition

The ‘father of Impressionism’—Camille Pissarro—emerges from this intimate account, written largely from his correspondence, as a dedicated and independent artist and a greathearted man. Anka Muhlstein has written a fine, fast-paced, readable account of a crucial figure in cultural history.

—Peter Brooks, author of Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative and Balzac’s Lives

PRAISE FOR MONSIEUR PROUST’S LIBRARY

"This gemlike exploration of the literary underpinnings of À la recherche du temps perdu reveals a Marcel Proust who did not so much read books as ‘absorb’ them."

—The New Yorker

"With Monsieur Proust’s Library, Anka Muhlstein has added another volume to the collection of splendid books about Proust. A woman of intellectual refinement, subtle understanding, and deep literary culture…Muhlstein is an excellent provisioner of high-quality intellectual goods."

—Wall Street Journal

[Muhlstein] here turns her attention to Proust’s enthusiasms, antagonisms, and literary influences…sensitive to nuances of style and echoes of older standard French authors.

—Edmund White, New York Review of Books

PRAISE FOR THE PEN AND THE BRUSH

"The close friendship, interaction, and parallelism between writers and artists in nineteenth-century France are the subject of Anka Muhlstein’s The Pen and the Brush…The subject is enormous, and might threaten to go off in every direction. What about photography? And book illustration? And sculpture? What about poets and pictures, both real and imaginary? Anka Muhlstein wisely limits herself to prose writers, and to five who speak to her most clearly: Balzac, Zola, Huysmans, Maupassant, and—a slight chronological cheat—Proust. The result is a personal, compact, intense book that provokes both much warm nodding and occasional friendly disagreement."

—Julian Barnes, New York Review of Books

Endlessly enjoyable…It may take a certain courage to offer the 21st-century reading public a compact cultural history of 19th-century France, seen through its major writers and painters and the currents which washed and swirled between them. This is not mainstream. Muhlstein, however, is a confident guide.

—The Guardian

PRAISE FOR BALZAC’S OMELETTE

This effervescent volume celebrates Balzac’s use of gastronomy as a literary device and social critique.

—The New Yorker

"Fabulous…worth nibbling on, as prelude or accompaniment to the pièce de résistance, The Human Comedy."

—New York Times Book Review

"Balzac’s Omelette…is a charming and modest little book."

—New York Review of Books

Muhlstein uses Balzac as a guide to the French culinary scene of the 19th century in a literary analysis that is original, delectable, and entirely readable.

—Washington Post

An absorbing and insightful portrait of Balzac…and of the role that food played in 19th-century France.

—Wall Street Journal

ALSO BY ANKA MUHLSTEIN

Monsieur Proust’s Library:

Celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of Marcel Proust

The Pen and the Brush:

How Passion for Art Shaped Nineteenth-Century French Novels

Balzac’s Omelette:

A Delicious Tour of French Food and Culture with Honoré de Balzac

Venice for Lovers, coauthored with Louis Begley

Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart: The Perils of Marriage

A Passion for Freedom: The Life of Astolphe de Custine

La Salle: Explorer of the North American Frontier

Baron James: The Rise of the French Rothschilds

Copyright © Anka Muhlstein, 2023

Translation copyright © Other Press, 2023

Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

Text designer: Patrice Sheridan

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016.

Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Muhlstein, Anka, author. | Hunter, Adriana, translator.

Title: Camille Pissarro : the audacity of impressionism / Anka Muhlstein; translated from the French by Adriana Hunter.

Description: New York : Other Press, [2023]

Identifiers: LCCN 2023000620 (print) | LCCN 2023000621 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781635421705 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781635421712 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Pissarro, Camille, 1830-1903. | Painters—France—Biography.

Classification: LCC ND553.P55 M84 2023 (print) | LCC ND553.P55 (ebook) |

DDC 759.4 [B]—dc23/eng/20230609

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023000620

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023000621

Ebook ISBN 9781635421712

a_prh_6.1_148365425_c0_r0

Pour Louis, Comme toujours et pour toujours

Contents

Introduction

1   Saint Thomas–Paris–Saint Thomas Round Trip

2   Rudderless Adventure in Venezuela

3   Paris: One-Way Ticket

4   A Mother, a Wife, and a Rather Different Family

5   The Group

6   War, Exile, and a Fortuitous Meeting

7   An Open-Air School: Work and Friendship

8   Upheavals, Poverty, and Unexpected Changes

9   The Family Man

10   A Painter and His Dealers

11   The Irruption of Politics: The Dreyfus Affair, 1894–1906

12   Paris from My Window

13   The Light Fades

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Chronology

Endnotes

Introduction

Camille Pissarro was a most unusual man. Granted, most artists are, but Pissarro knew that he was even more out of step with the France of his day than his peers. I have a rustic, melancholy temperament, I look coarse and wild, he acknowledged.[1] Later, he added, 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.[2] Settled in France from the age of twenty-five but born in the Caribbean, he was not French, and what is more he was Jewish. He never hid this fact and knew that it was not without significance. He saw himself as an interloper in French society even though he was a founding member of the new school of French painting, was affectionately nicknamed the father of Impressionism by his peers, was a close friend of Monet, a longtime associate in Degas’s and Cassatt’s experimental work, a support to Cézanne and Gauguin, and a comfort to Van Gogh, and was backed throughout his career by the great Parisian art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. Nevertheless, a sense of being set apart, different, and hard to classify persisted, and this is what drew me to Pissarro.

He portrayed himself four times in thirty years, and his self-portraits help us form an impression of his gravitas, his calm, and the intensity of his gaze, but he also left a fifth portrait, a more detailed, more complex, and often unexpected one, the portrait constituted by his correspondence. Reading a person’s correspondence is a little like eavesdropping. We are breaking and entering into the intimate world of someone who has let their guard down. The more sustained the exchange, the more personal it is, and the deeper and more nuanced the letter writer’s self-portrait becomes.

Camille Pissarro left a vast accumulation of letters, most of which were brought together in five volumes and edited by Janine Bailly-Herzberg.[3] Although not exhaustive, these volumes are certainly enough to give an idea of a painter’s life in the nineteenth century and, more specifically, of the audacity of the Impressionist adventure. But what I found most interesting about this correspondence was the self-portrait that emerges from it. Given that most of Pissarro’s letters are to his children, the tone is utterly unconstrained. Pissarro did not use the familiar tu form when addressing his fellow painters, even those he had known as a student. He always showed his peers a courtesy not far removed from reserve, but abandoned all restraint particularly in his exchanges with his eldest son. The question of religion recurs frequently over the pages. During a period of despondency, this resolute atheist admits that his origins have left their mark on him: To date, 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.[4]

This is a curious remark insofar as he never interjected political or religious messages in his art. He good-naturedly admitted that for a Hebrew he was far from biblical. He felt that painting should be neither literary or historical, nor political or social, but only the expression of a feeling. The fact remains, though, that he was fully conscious of the consequences of his lineage. He confesses to sometimes feeling like an outsider in France. Being not only Jewish but also foreign necessitated a degree of caution that did not come naturally to him. This man who consistently demonstrated bravery in his artistic choices, who was never slow to develop or change his style, or to admit his mistakes, without ever giving way to the pressures of public demand; this man whose personal life was characterized by an absolute refusal to accept family or social conventions; this man still knew he must never openly take part in the political battles of his time. The threat of expatriation enforced on him a reserve that he never waived. Being very sensitive to social injustice, he did whatever was within his means to support anarchist publications but never made public Les Turpitudes sociales (Social turpitudes), a series of striking caricatures about suffering among the working class. And, although he openly sided with the Dreyfusards, he did not play such an active role in their struggle as did many of his peers, including Eugène Carrière, Edouard Vuillard, and the Swiss Félix Vallotton.

All his energy was concentrated into his art, his children’s artistic education, and the fight to have modern art recognized. He was exceptionally hardworking and left a considerable body of work—more than fifteen hundred oils, not to mention the pastels, watercolors, and drawings—as well as being a gifted teacher whose four sons all went on to be respected artists. He had a tremendous talent for attracting and working closely with artists as diverse as Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin, Signac, and Seurat. Whenever the opportunity arose, he refused to comply with the demands of official art, and he alone with Degas participated in every Impressionist exhibition, serenely braving the insults and jeers because he was convinced of the validity of his experimental work.

Perhaps it fell to him, with his particularly independent spirit, to adopt a system that encouraged freedom and autonomy. Make your plans with no rules, or at least with none that you find offensive, he advised his son.[5] With this he was arguing for a new tradition, a modern one that granted artists the ability to invent, to keep reevaluating their own work, and to justify their reputation as fierce revolutionar[ies].[6]

1

Saint Thomas–Paris–Saint Thomas Round Trip

Camille Pissarro was born in 1830 in Saint Thomas, one of the three main Virgin Islands in the archipelago of the Lesser Antilles, a tiny island measuring twenty kilometers long by four wide that was under Danish rule at the time. It is difficult now to imagine how strategically and economically important these three islands—Saint Thomas, the even smaller Saint John, and the larger Saint Croix—once were. Positioned at the intersection of various maritime routes, they gave vessels from Europe and Africa access not only to Central America but also to North and South America. The port of Saint Thomas, Charlotte Amalie, was so sought-after that it was said to be the place that led to everywhere else.[1] The port’s commercial advantages were such that, over the centuries, it elicited covetous attention from the French, the English, the Dutch, and the Danes.

The Spanish, led by Christopher Columbus, had been the first Europeans to land on these islands, in 1493. Disappointed by the absence of gold or silver mines, they did not stay long, but the inhabitants did not survive this violent irruption and the propagation of unfamiliar germs. The islands remained uninhabited other than by bands of pirates who attacked Spanish galleons laden with precious metals on their return to Seville and Cadiz. After several fruitless attempts thwarted by opposition from the Spanish, the English, and the French, in 1672 the Danish West India Company secured permission from the king of Denmark to found a colony on the then deserted island of Saint Thomas. Almost as soon as it was established, this colony attracted British, French, Dutch, and Jewish emigrants who lived on the neighboring islands. They were fleeing the repercussions of the European war between the Dutch Republic on the one side and England and France on the other, and were seeking protection from Denmark, which had remained neutral. These newcomers set up the first cotton and sugarcane plantations, and the corollary of this was the importation of enslaved Africans. A slave market was swiftly put in place, and colonizers from other islands came here for slaves. In 1673 the population of Saint Thomas ran to 100 whites and 100 blacks; in 1715 it was inventoried at 565 whites and 4,187 blacks.

Over the course of the next century the economy in Saint Thomas changed. Charlotte Amalie expanded, and the island’s triangular trade became so substantial that the inhabitants deemed it more lucrative to leave sugarcane cultivation to colonizers on the nearby island of Saint Croix, which Denmark had bought from France in 1733, and devote themselves entirely to the slave trade.[2] The English seized the island during the Napoleonic wars, but in 1815 they signed an accord with Denmark, which took back possession of the island that same year and made it a free port. A great variety of import-export companies—large and small, English, French, Italian, Spanish, and German—set up shop, and the atmosphere on the island became more cosmopolitan. The tenor of the population altered too. The cruel practice of slavery continued on Saint Croix, where 90 percent of the population was enslaved, but declined in Saint Thomas, where sugar cultivation was gradually phased out.[3] There was, however, still a considerable number of slaves in domestic service.

—

Camille Pissarro’s mother, Rachel Pomié Manzana, was born in Saint Thomas in 1795. Nothing is known about her family’s history. Her parents or grandparents, who were Sephardic Jews, had left France at the end of the eighteenth century, initially to set up home in Saint-Domingue and then in Saint Thomas in 1791. Meanwhile, Camille’s father, Frédéric Pissarro, was born in France, and his paternal grandfather, a Portuguese Sephardic Jew, in Braganza. Portugal, like Spain, had been persecuting Jews since the sixteenth century, and the constant threat of the Inquisition forced many to live as Christians while practicing their true religion in absolute secrecy. These Marranos, as they were known, fled Portugal at the first opportunity; which is how, in 1769, the Pissarros managed to reach Bordeaux, a city that was very open to overseas trade and had been welcoming and protecting Portuguese Jews since the reign of Henri II. On payment of a tax, they secured the right to practice their religion openly and to exercise whatever trade they chose.

Portuguese Jews constituted the most flourishing Jewish community in eighteenth-century France. They specialized in industry and, in particular, the processing of commodities from the colonies. The Gradis, the most prosperous family in the naçao (the Sephardic community), had a monopoly on sugar; and the Da Costas on chocolate, which was introduced to France by the Jewish community in Bayonne. Other opportunities for accruing wealth were offered by banking, outfitting ships, insurance, and most significantly, by trading in slaves and freight heading for colonies in the Americas.[4]

Joseph Gabriel Pissarro settled in Bordeaux’s trading community and married a local Jewish woman, Anne-Félicité Petit. When their son, Frédéric, was born in 1802 he was entirely French because Jews had been emancipated in 1791. The family prospered and, like many Jewish families, extended its activities over the Atlantic.

As part of this expansion, Joseph Gabriel’s brother-in-law Isaac Petit set sail for the West Indies and settled in Saint Thomas, joining one of the most populous and complex Jewish communities in the New World. The first synagogue on the island was built in 1796; it was destroyed by fire in 1804. A second synagogue was erected in 1812 but was very soon outgrown and was replaced by a third. In 1823 the town was ravaged by fire, and the Jews had to build yet another new place of worship. It was completed in 1833 and this synagogue is still standing. It has kept its original furnishings and the custom of spreading sand over the floorboards as a reminder of the days when the Marranos had to stifle every sound during their services; it is one of the two oldest synagogues in the Americas.[5]

The Jews in Saint Thomas were not a homogenous group. A Sephardic element that had originated in Bordeaux and Bayonne and was intermingled with Spanish and Portuguese immigrants lived alongside families of Dutch extraction formerly based in Curaçao and a small number of Danish Ashkenazi Jews. At the time, Jews constituted one-quarter of the white population, a population that had always been extremely diverse. (A 1688 census noted that inhabitants with European roots came from eleven different countries.) The population included American and Danish Protestants, as well as a sizable Roman Catholic faction. Saint Thomas and its trading activities drew in a good many Venezuelans and other Central Americans. The official religion was the Lutheran church, as in Denmark. It goes without saying that the great majority of inhabitants were black. The phasing out of plantations had given some of them the opportunity to live as free men either because they had been released from slavery or, more commonly, because they had bought their freedom. They earned their livings as craftsmen, shopkeepers, or clerks. An 1834 decree from King Frederick VI gave citizenship to all free blacks, along with the same rights and privileges as white inhabitants. But it took one final slave rebellion on the island of Saint Croix for slavery to be abolished at last in 1847.

When he arrived on the island in about 1810, Isaac Petit married Esther Manzana Pomié. Esther died young, and, true to Jewish tradition, Isaac then married her younger sister, Rachel, who was some twenty years his junior. They set up home in Charlotte Amalie to take advantage of the three-way trading arrangements between Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Isaac Petit soon found himself running an extremely lucrative warehouse for a variety of goods. The business was flourishing when he died in 1824. Pregnant with a fourth child, distraught, and unable to run the company, Rachel turned to her late husband’s family. The business was too profitable to be left to founder, so the French family swiftly sent out someone to help the widow: young Frédéric Pissarro, Isaac’s nephew, whom the latter had in fact appointed as the executor of his will.

His aunt’s welcome went beyond his expectations. In the spring of 1825 she was pregnant again and gave birth to a son, Félix, causing a scandal in the community. It may have been common for an uncle to marry his niece, but for a nephew to seduce his aunt (even if only by marriage), and especially when she was seven years his senior, was deemed inadmissible. Rachel and Frédéric took no heed of this. Furthermore, Félix’s birth coming so soon after the arrival of Isaac’s last child proved that they had contravened the Jewish law stipulating that a man may not have relations with a woman who is breastfeeding a newborn. The synagogue therefore did not grant them permission to marry. They proceeded regardless and exchanged their vows in a private house before a minyan, a group of ten adult Jews that was essential for the recitation of prayers and hence for any religious ceremony. The young couple announced they were married in the newspaper, but the synagogue in Saint Thomas did not accept this fait accompli and refused to recognize the marriage; it even went so far as to run a large-display notice in the same newspaper, the St. Thomas Tidende, to state categorically that the synagogue’s authorities, the Rulers and Wardens of the Synagogue, did not accept it.[6] The synagogue in Copenhagen supported this decision. By contrast, the civil administration recorded the marriage, but the Petit family in Bordeaux, concerned that they might lose their business to a Pissarro nephew, announced that they were against the union. It was a complicated matter, and the dispute continued for eight years.

The synagogue finally yielded in 1833 after the king of Denmark intervened, having been asked to settle this thorny question once and for all. In the meantime, three more sons had been born, Moïse Alfred in 1829, Jacob Camille in 1830, and Aron Gustave in 1833.

As a result of this long controversy, the children attended neither the Hebrew school nor the Christian school. The scandal caused by their parents’ union was not confined to the Jewish community. There is no doubting that the tiny white community was hungry for malicious gossip, and the Pissarro boys would not have been comfortable alongside children from these families. They took classes at the Moravian school, where lessons were taught in English by missionaries, and where most of the students were black children.[7] The school had been founded to convert and educate them. It was here that Camille acquired a perfect knowledge of English along with an unusual self-assurance and immunity to prejudice in the world around him. He also escaped the intolerance typical of many small religious communities. The Pissarro boys would certainly have been excused from religious instruction given by the missionaries, but, bearing in mind the synagogue’s attitude toward their parents, it is not at all clear whether they received any Jewish instruction. Camille Pissarro never made any mention of a Bar Mitzvah. His parents remained attached to their respective fathers’ tradition, but their circumstances did not facilitate passing it on.

The Pissarros lived over the shop, which was usually crammed with merchandise, in a house that stands to this day. It has been named the Camille Pissarro Building and is now a gallery. When Camille was a child, it must have felt very small for Rachel’s eight children. She was helped by two slaves and other servants, but her capricious moods provoked frequent storms. Within the family, the day-today language was French. English was spoken mostly for business affairs; Danish, which was used only for settling administrative matters, was not common. The