La cueillette des pommes pissarro biography
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Camille Pissarro
Called the father of Impressionism, Camille Pissarro was born in on the island of Saint Thomas in the West Indies. After a French boarding school education and six years spent working in his parents’ store, at the age of 22 Pissarro turned his back on his bourgeois life in favour of a career in art.
Initially, Pissarro assisted the Danish painter Fritz Melbye and studied works by artists he admired including Gustave Courbet, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Jean-François Millet. In , he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and attended classes at the Académie Suisse, where he met Claude Monet. Through Monet, he was introduced to Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley.
Working alongside these artists, Pissarro abandoned the more traditional approaches to landscape painting that had thus far underpinned his practice and instead embraced a phenomenological understanding of colour. Over time he became more and more opposed to the
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The Perennial Student
What is a shadow? Nothing in itself, you might say: a mere local lack of light, in a space that is otherwise lit up. Light, which allows us to see and know the world, is the normal precondition for picturing things. Cast shadows may help us interpret a picture by indicating where light comes from and where objects stand, but if you survey art history, you find the majority of painters giving them minor parts at most. A minority, however, turns these assumptions upside down, treating shadow as the preexistent condition and light as its shock interruption. If Giotto, Bruegel, or Courbet present worlds to be seen and known, the seventeenth-century masters of chiaroscuro and their nineteenth-century sympathizers—think Manet’s Olympia—forsake solid fact in favor of dazzle. But once you open up that second possibility, a third emerges. Take shadow and light as opposite ends of a scale, and the tonal notes lying between them offer a means to c
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Young Peasant Having Her Coffee ()
Camille Pissarro was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas (now in the US Virgin Islands, but then in the Danish West Indies). His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Pissarro studied from great forerunners, including Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He later studied and worked alongside Georges Seurat and Paul Signac when he took on the Neo-Impressionist style at the age of
In he helped establish a collective society of fifteen aspiring artists, becoming the "pivotal" figure in holding the group together and encouraging the other members. Art historian John Rewald called Pissarro the "dean of the Impressionist painters", not only because he was the oldest of the group, but also "by virtue of his wisdom and his balanced, kind, and warmhearted personality". Paul Cézanne said "he was a father for me. A man to consult and a li