Exhibition Highlights
Presiding over the powerful themes of this exhibition are three of the artist’s four major self-portraits, starting with his earliest Self-Portrait (1873) from the Musée d’Orsay, painted at the age of forty-three. Pissarro’s People is the first exhibition to bring these works together with portrait likenesses of every member of the artist’s immediate family, reflecting the importance that he attached to his roles as devoted husband and father.
Pissarro was the only Impressionist who made figure paintings in which the domestic worker is the central motif. The exhibition brings together an extraordinary group of paintings representing maidservants and washerwomen, including The Maidservant (1875, Chrysler Museum of Art), Washerwoman, Study (1880, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), The Little Country Maid (1882, Tate Collection) and In the Garden at Pontoise: A Young Woman Washing Dishes (1882, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). The key theme of domestic labor is linked, in turn, to Pissarro’s views on agricultural labor and the market economy in works such as The Harvest (1882, National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo), The Gisors Market (1887, Columbus Museum of Art) and his remarkable, biting album of anarchist drawings titled Turpitudes sociales (1889–90, private collection) which is being shown for the first time.
Pissarro held firm to the belief that the miseries of modern capitalist society would inevitably lead to revolution in Europe, and in his late multifigure rural genre paintings, he envisioned a better world as he imagined it would appear in the aftermath of such a momentous uprising. His late scenes of the grain harvest in Haymakers, Evening, Éragny (1893, Joslyn Art Museum), apple picking in Apple Harvest (1888, Dallas Museum of Art) and potato planting are utterly joyous in feeling, bathed in an idealized glow of light and health and abundance.
The Artist
Pissarro was in many ways a political and ethnic outsider in his adopted country of France. Born into a Sephardic Jewish family on the Danish colony of Saint Thomas in the Caribbean on July 10, 1830, he would never become a French citizen. He died a Danish citizen in Paris on November 13, 1903.
Pissarro’s lifelong interest in the human condition is unique among Impressionist landscape painters. From his early years in the Caribbean and Venezuela until his death, he produced a vast oeuvre of drawings, paintings and prints dedicated to the human figure. He was also a committed reader of radical social, political and economic theory. His profound knowledge of social philosophy, which informs much of his art, far exceeded that of any other significant painter of the period.
Pissarro’s People was organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. The catalogue
Pissarro's People is written by Dr. Richard R. Brettell, one of the world’s foremost authorities on Impressionism and French painting from 1830 to 1930. Richly illustrated with more than two hundred paintings, works on paper and archival images, this compelling volume offers a definitive portrait of one of the most passionately political painters of the nineteenth century.
Paintings:
(Top): Poultry Market, Pontoise, 1892. Tempera and pastel, private collection.
(Middle) Young Woman Washing Plates, 1882. Oil on canvas. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, United Kingdom
(Bottom) Apple Pickers, Eragny, 1888. Oil on canvas. Dallas Museum of Art.
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