Ambroise Vollard: Pissarro

"The Artist's Garden at Eragny" by Camillie Pissarro

"The first thing that struck one in Pissarro was his air of kindness, of sensitiveness, and at the same time of serenity, a serenity born of work accomplished with joy. And yet what a life of vicissitude was his. He suffered poverty, the common lot of all the painters of that period when pictures were not selling. And he had a great many children. Mme Pissarro tilled the ground herself to feed her family. Then came the 'Année Terrible,' the Commune. The painter, after being turned out of his studio, came back to find it destroyed. His paintings, which represented a considerable amount of work, had disappeared! 

But in spite of so much wasted effort he would not yield to discouragement and went on producing painting after painting. Looking at those landscapes that exhaled the very scent of the fields, those quiet peasant women bending over their cabbages, those placid goosegirls, who would guess that most of those canvases were painted during the period of the artist's worst calamities?

On his way back from Durand-Ruel's, Pissarro would often stop at my place for a chat. With what openness of mind this old man, with his great white beard, judged his fellows, Cézanne, Renoir, Calude Monet! He was interested in all the experiments which at that time were exciting the artists. He was curious about every form of art. During one of the last visits he paid me, he spoke with rapture of a page of an old book. He was studying it from the standpoint of a typographer of the days when linotype did not exist.

His sons all became artists, as was only to be expected. One of them, Manzana Pissarro, became one of the masters of decorative art. The eldest, Lucien, fell under the spell of bioliophily. He turned printer, illustrator, publisher. The first work that came from his press, 'La Reine des Poissons,' disheartened me by its perfection; but in the end it helped to spur me on to attempt publishing myself."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Recollections of a Picture Dealer" by Ambroise Vollard.)