Lucien Pissarro

Lucien Pissarro		Portrait by William Strang , 1920

Lucien Pissarro (* 20th February 1863 in Paris ; † 10. July 1944 in Heywood , England ) was a French painter of Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism , graphic artist and wood carver . He came from the artist family Pissarro .

life and work

Lucien Pissarro, painted in 1875 by his father Camille Pissarro

Pissarro was the eldest son of Julie Vellay (1839–1926) and the impressionist painter Camille Pissarro , with whom he trained and developed his artistic skills together. His brothers were the artists Georges Henri Pissarro , Félix Pissarro , Ludovic Rodolphe Pissarro and Paul Émile Pissarro . Lucien was married to Esther Levi Bensusan (1870-1951), who supported him in his work. The daughter Orovida Camille Pissarro (1893–1968), who worked as a painter and etcher, emerged from the marriage .

Pissarro's family fled the Franco-Prussian War to London in 1870 , where he lived with relatives in Upper Norwood on the outskirts of London.

He returned to France in 1871, first to Louveciennes , then to Pontoise . Through the contact with Paul Cézanne and Claude Monet , who belonged to his father's circle of artist friends, and his father's lessons, he was introduced to Impressionist painting at an early age. He began with landscape painting, but from 1880 he was also interested in the technique of wood printing and woodcut. From 1883 to 1884 he returned to England and lived in north London. He worked here for a music publisher and learned the English language. From 1884 to 1890 Pissarro worked for the printer Manzi . He was on friendly terms with representatives of pointillism , Paul Signac and Georges Seurat . Vincent van Gogh dedicated Panier de pommes ( German  basket with apples ), French à l'ami Lucien Pissarro , to him in 1887 , which can be seen today in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands .

Time in England

From 1890 he lived permanently in London , not ultimately because of his admiration for the work of the English painter William Morris and the illustrators of the Arts and Crafts Movements . He lectured on Impressionism at the Art Workers Guild in 1891 . On August 10, 1892, in Richmond , he married Esther Levi Bensusan, whom he had met on his first visit in 1883. The couple first went on their honeymoon to Rouen , after which they spent eight months with his parents in Éragny, northwest of Paris. After their return to England they settled in Epping (Essex) , where they lived from 1893 to 1897. Their daughter and only child, Orovida Camille Pissarro, was born there on October 8, 1893.

Inspired by William Morris' private printer Kelmscott Press , Lucien founded the "Éragny Press" in Hammersmith in 1894, the first publication of which was a translation of the French fairy tale The Queen of the Fishes (1894) by Margaret Rust, a friend of Esther, with colored woodcuts and handwritten text Text by Lucien. The volume was published in collaboration with Vale Press , to whose operators Charles Ricketts (1866-1931) and Charles Shannon (1863-1937) Luciens had a friendly relationship. Éragny Press existed until 1914 and published 33 books. The production of illustrated books was not atypical for British artists of the 1890s. Pissarro, whose prints reflected his socialist beliefs, collaborated with the anarchist press in London and Paris.

“Stamford Brook”, plaque on Pissarro's house in London, 2013

In March 1897, Lucien Pissarro suffered a stroke, after which he could no longer work outdoors, so that he only painted irregularly until 1905. The family moved to Bedford Park in Chiswick , west London , in April . Esther helped Lucien continue his heavily scaled-down book production, for which he used engravings that he had made before his illness. In 1902 the family moved again, this time to a nearby house and studio ( The Brook , 27 Stamford Brook Road).

At the end of 1904, at the New English Art Club, Pissarro again came into contact with artists whom he had met more than ten years earlier. At Walter Sickert's invitation, he became a member of the Fitzroy Street Group in 1907 . In 1911, Lucien Pissarro was one of the founders of the Camden Town Group , a group of English neo-impressionists. In 1914 he resigned from the group that was now called The London Group . Pissarro was of the opinion that with the Cubists Wyndham Lewis , Frederick Etchells, Cuthbert Hamilton, Christopher Nevinson and Edward Wadsworth "the wrong clique ... gained influence" here. In 1916 he received British citizenship.

Pissarro's closest friend at the time was the art critic and painter James Bolivar Manson . The two of them met around 1910 when Pissarro introduced him to the Fitzroy Street Group . Manson wrote an article on Pissarro's book illustrations in 1913 and another on Pissarro's pictures in 1916. He brokered Pissarro's works to private collectors, to art institutions in the United Kingdom, and in 1916 to the New York patron and art collector John Quinn . As "worshipers of nature" and the Impressionist principles, Manson and Pissarro founded the Monarro Group in 1919 , the name of which was composed of the surnames Claude Monets and Camille Pissarros. The group organized two exhibitions in 1920 and 1921 and aimed at spreading Impressionism in England.

After Lucien's death in 1944, his wife Esther left the extensive family archive to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Art historian Anne Thorold viewed and published the material in the 1980s and 1990s. Of the Camille children, Lucien had probably the best contact with his father. After Lucien's first visit to England, Camille began a long and almost daily correspondence with his son. The letters are considered important documents in the history of the Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist movements.

plant

Lucien Pissarro belonged with Walter Sickert and Philip Wilson Steer to the first generation of impressionist painters in Great Britain. In his painting, Pissarro remained true to his father's impressionist principles. Many of his paintings show landscapes, all of which he had made on site, either in the great outdoors or looking out of a window. He often chose the barren landscape of South England and the interplay between rain clouds and sunshine as subjects for his pictures. From 1913 to 1919 he painted the English countryside of Dorset , Westmorland , Devon , Essex , Surrey and Sussex without any theatrical or romantic undertones. Much of his later works do not contain the luminosity of his neo-impressionist works from before 1890. His few portraits mostly show members of his family.

Paintings (selection)

• 

  The Stour at Stratford St Mary, Colchester , about 1900

• 

  Brookleton Yulgreave , about 1900

• 

  Girl picking flowers , around 1900

April, Epping 1894 High View, Fish Pond 1915 Ivy Cottage, Coldharbour: Sun and Snow 1916 All Saints' Church, Hastings: Sun and Mist 1918 Almond Trees, Le Lavandou 1923 Stratford-Upon-Avon The Hill at Charmouth, 1920

The Golf Links, Acton (A June Morning), 1906 The Brook, Sunny Weather Wootton-under-Edge Boissy-L'Aillerie, 1926 Paysage, early 1890s Apparition of the Prime Minister Habitants Le Défilé Royal

Exhibitions (selection)

In 1886 he showed ten of his works in the Salon des Indépendants of the Société des Artistes Indépendants , from which he left in 1896. In 1888 Pissarro exhibited with the avant-garde group Société des Vingt in Brussels. Together with Signac and Seurat , he exhibited at the exhibition of Neo-Impressionism in Paris from December 1892 to January 1893 and from December 1893 to January 1894.

In 1904 he exhibited his picture April, Epping at the New English Art Club , later also with the Fitzroy Street Group . His first solo exhibition took place in May 1913 at the Carfax Gallery . In the 1920s and 1930s he exhibited brisk activity, occasionally presenting his work with exhibits from his father and daughter. From 1934 he exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts . In 1946 and 1947, many of his paintings and woodcuts were shown in memorial exhibitions in London's Leicester Galleries .

literature

• Will Grohmann : Pissarro, Lucien . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 27 : Piermaria – Ramsdell . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1933, p. 110 .
• Pissarro, Lucien . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists of the XX. Century. tape 3 : K-P . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1956, p. 596 .
• David Buckman: Dictionary of Artists in Britain since 1945. 2006, Vol. 2, p. 1056 (English).
• The Gentle Art. A collection of books and wood engravings by Lucien Pissarro. Éragny Press, London; L'Art ancien SA, Zurich 1974 (English).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w} David Fraser Jenkins, Helena Bonett: Lucien Pissarro 1863–1944. In: Tate Gallery , February 2011 (English, tate.org.uk ).
2. ↑ Stern Pissarro Gallery: Pissarro Family. (English, pissarro.art ).
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n} Lucien Pissarro. Paris 1863 - London 1944. In: Art Directory (English, lucien-pissarro.de ).
4. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i} Gerhard Finckh (ed.): Camille Pissarro - The father of impressionism . Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal 2014, ISBN 978-3-89202-091-2 , p. 390 (exhibition catalog).
5. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Stern Pissarro Gallery: Lucien Pissarro (1863–1944). (English, pissarro.art ).
6. ↑ Pissarro's Letters. In: The Sydney Morning Herald . September 23, 1944 (English, trove.nla.gov.au ).