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(THEME MUSIC)

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(PIANO MUSIC)

(BIRDS CHIRRUPING)

(BIRDS CHIRRUPING)

ACTOR AS CAMILLE PISSARRO: To stop a young man going

where his passions take him

is virtually impossible.

When I think that, when I was young,

I found myself, like everybody,

left to my own devices in a foreign land...

free, completely free,

and that I was fortunate enough never to fall foul of fate,

I ask myself: What advice I could possibly give?

The author of the present had a powerful distraction -

..art!

(PIANO MUSIC CONTINUES)

(PIANO MUSIC ENDS)

Camille Pissarro is often considered the "Father of Impressionism".

Not only in art historical terms, but also by his contemporaries.

He was the most restlessly experimental

of all the Impressionist artists.

He was one of the first of the Impressionists

exhibited at the group exhibition in 1874,

with artists like Sisley, Monet, Renoir and Degas.

AGNES VALENCAK: He was an older generation

of the many Impressionists,

and he's famously referred to as the Father of Impressionism

by these other artists and younger generations.

And he has the other benefit that he had this huge beard.

So physically he appears like a father

which in itself made him rather patriarchal.

COLIN HARRISON: He was warm. He was completely devoted to his family.

Although he had minor tiffs with some other artists,

he was always accommodating, he was very generous.

He was always short of money,

which is an endearing trait sometimes.

He was a very sympathetic conversationalist as well,

but he was also completely upright.

His contemporaries noted that he was really the byword

for honesty and probity.

He became a mentor for later generations of artists,

people like Gauguin who, in fact,

he persuaded to start painting professionally.

People like Paul Cezanne who, in fact, described him as:

"The father of us all".

JOSEF HELFENSTEIN: Pissarro is so extraordinary.

He was an innovator. He was very intellectually curious.

He was almost altruistic.

And that makes him a very unusual artist in a way,

because he was this mediator, this kind of bridge

between different personalities.

And then the teacher-disciple model, he was not interested in that.

He was an anarchist, meaning that he did not like

any kind of hierarchy or any kind of system with hierarchy.

CLAIRE DURAND-RUEL: (SPEAKS FRENCH)

STURGIS: Pissarro is a fascinating artist

because he's absolutely central to the Impressionist movement,

and yet he is quite difficult to describe as an artist.

I mean, whatever the caricature might be,

if you're asked to describe Degas or Monet -

your water lilies or your ballet dancers -

that's not the case with Pissarro.

And I think that's partly because he was so open to others.

He's an open-hearted artist and an open-minded artist.

It's an extraordinary thing that the Ashmolean

holds the Pissarro archive in the collection.

And so this includes over 800 letters by Camille Pissarro himself,

countless drawings and about 50 paintings by various Pissarros,

not only Camille, but his children and indeed grandchildren.

Since its foundation, the Ashmolean has changed beyond recognition

and is now a very different museum

to the one that was founded in the 17th century.

It's now a museum of art and archaeology.

There are, of course, some specific and famous treasures

such as the Alfred Jewel

or the Messiah Violin,

the best-preserved Stradivarius anywhere in the world.

Guy Fawkes' lantern. The lantern Guy Fawkes was actually holding

when he was arrested under the Houses Of Parliament,

and Uccello's Renaissance masterpiece

"The Hunt in the Forest".

One can, of course, go on.

And one shouldn't forget the great 19th-century collections

we hold too - both the British Pre-Raphaelites,

but, of course, the Impressionist collection that we hold

which is centred on the figure of Camille Pissarro

and the Pissarro family archive.

It's impossible to put on any major loan exhibition

without the collaboration and partnership

of colleagues across the world,

but partnering with another museum on a specific exhibition

helps in so many ways.

It's a way of sharing knowledge, sharing collections

and sharing scholarship to a far wider audience.

The Kunstmuseum in Basel could not have been a better partner for us.

They have wonderful complementary collections of Impressionist works,

so we could share those with each other.

And also we were developing these ideas around Camille Pissarro

at precisely the same time,

so that we were natural partners for this show.

OLGA OSADTSCHY: I think Pissarro is extremely fascinating,

because once you start looking at his biography

and at his role in art history,

you see that he's kind of the original networker.

He was a person who came to France without knowing anybody,

at a very young age and immediately started pulling threads together

and looking for like-minded artists to form unions with

and form alliances with.

I think he was an extremely passionate man,

a difficult man and a driven man.

So he was somebody who put art before everything else.

COLIN HARRISON: Camille Pissarro was born at Charlotte Amalie,

the island of St Thomas in the Danish West Indies.

His parents were Jewish, had come from France to be merchants.

I've often asked myself how important his religion

or his race was to Camille, being Jewish.

Certainly, he was proud of his heritage,

but in terms of practising religion, he never practised.

Pissarro's parents sent him to Paris

when he was 12 years old to further his education.

He spent six years at the Pension Savary, where he learnt

the usual rudiments of grammar, Latin, mathematics and so forth.

But showed a very dangerous tendency to want to draw.

Six years later, he went back to St Thomas

to take up work in his family business.

By chance, he met the Danish artist Fritz Melbye on the docks.

The two became firm friends and, in fact,

this was the first relationship with a proper artist

that Camille had ever had.

The two went on sketching expeditions and painting expeditions

in the Danish West Indies,

and in 1852 they went to Venezuela,

which was quite near but extremely exotic.

And, in fact, the beginnings of Camille's art

can be seen in the drawings and the paintings

that he made on this early expedition.

PISSARRO: I was in St Thomas in 1852,

a well-paid shop clerk.

But I couldn't stand it,

so without giving it a thought I dropped everything

and ran off to Caracas,

to break the mooring that tied me to bourgeois life.

What I suffered is incredible, of course, but I lived.

AGNES VALENCAK: We have this great photograph of Camille

in gaucho attire in the archive.

It's completely odd.

Pissarro, in his early 20s,

would have been like any 20-year-old now - exploring life.

You know, going to the cafes, going to the bars in the evening.

But it's an opportunity to explore life without parents

because previously he was working with Dad in his company.

You know, doing work every day and then drawing outside.

And now suddenly nobody tells him when to get up.

Nobody tells him what to do and when to do it.

Exploring art very seriously because by that stage,

he really knows that's what he wants to become.

But having a party life as well.

(SOARING INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC)

Pissarro arrived in Paris in time to visit the Universal Exhibition,

and this was a great event.

Corot was there and other landscape artists.

He was also very much struck by a number of other artists

of the same kind of generation as Corot, perhaps a few years younger.

The artists of the Barbizon School who worked at Barbizon,

a village in the forest of Fontainebleau,

painting realist landscapes very much influenced

by the sight of John Constable.

Amongst the artists of the Barbizon School,

who particularly impressed Camille,

were Daubigny, Theodore Rousseau, and Jean-Francois Millet.

I think Camille admires the Barbizon artists

because they really were very unconventional.

JOSEF HELFENSTEIN: Daubigny became maybe an even more

important friend in his life

because he was on the jury of the Salon sometimes

and was very much trying to influence his colleagues

to accept those young people

who were trying a new way of representing nature.

The Salon is really a kind of an unbelievable, fascinating system.

It was totally hierarchical, of course,

so it was the only opportunity for a young artist to become known,

you know, to show your work in public in an accepted way.

Thousands of paintings in the end were shown high up on the wall

or badly lit and so on.

So even the way how you were presented

and how your paintings were hung was very important.

You could be in the exhibition,

but nobody would actually see your painting very well.

But the only way to get accepted as a painter

was to be accepted in the Salon.

ACTOR AS EMILE ZOLA: Camille Pissarro has been exhibiting

for nine years now.

For nine years, he has been showing the critics and the public

strong canvases, painted with conviction,

though the critics do not condescend to notice them.

Camille Pissarro is one of the three or four painters of our time.

He has solidity and breadth of execution.

He paints generously,

in keeping with the traditions, like the Masters.

I have seldom encountered a more profound grasp of painting.

A beautiful picture by this artist is the act of an honest man.

I could give no better definition of his talent.

He believed that the countryside

was where the essential work of the...of the nation carried on.

He was very much an anti-capitalist. He didn't recognise authority.

He believed that an artist should be free to do what he wanted,

not to pander to the taste of the bourgeois.

Not to pander to the dictates of the dealers.

Camille, I think, always maintained

that painting should be experimental.

It should test the boundaries of aesthetics and taste.

By the end of the 1860s, he and Monet and others

had developed what we now recognise as Impressionism.

Pissarro was one of the most unconventional figures

of the 19th century.

He was also a devoted family man.

Camille met his future wife, Julie Vellay,

because she was a servant in his parents' household.

They quickly fell in love.

She came from a very modest background.

She was a peasant from Burgundy,

and their relationship was never very straightforward.

His parents didn't approve of the relationship.

They were quite opposites in some sense.

CLAIRE DURAND-RUEL:

ACTRESS AS JULIE PISSARRO: You see that there's not much chance on this side.

Another fortnight spent doing nothing,

and you are no richer, and no pictures, no work done.

I don't understand why you spend your time like this.

I don't understand a thing.

Winter's coming, and you've spent the entire summer in Paris,

and you yourself tell me everyone you know has left.

What on earth are you doing, in that case?

You should at least tell me, so that I don't call you an idler.

(INHALES, SIGHS)

I'm very tired of living like this.

(RUMBLING)

(BOOM OF EXPLOSION)

(SOMBRE MUSIC)

HARRISON: The turmoil of the Franco-Prussian War

was extraordinarily important for French artists.

It arose from the political ambitions

of the Prussian Chancellor Bismarck,

who wanted to unify Germany and to assert his authority over France.

Unwisely, Napoleon III thought

that he might boost his failing popularity

by declaring war on Prussia.

Pissarro, although he'd wanted to fight for France,

his mother was absolutely adamant that he shouldn't.

He wasn't even French. He still had, and indeed had all his life,

a Danish passport.

In 1871 the French had to surrender.

France was utterly humiliated.

But Pissarro and his family had already fled to England

where he met Monet and he met the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel.

PISSARRO: My dear Monsieur Duret,

here...there is no art.

Everything is a question of business.

My painting isn't catching on, it simply isn't.

A fate that pursues me more or less everywhere.

Regarding sales, I've not had a single one,

apart from Durand-Ruel who bought two small pictures from me.

CLAIRE DURAND-RUEL:

COLIN HARRISON: In 1871, Pissarro returned to France

to his studio at Louveciennes,

only to discover that 20 years' work had been destroyed

by the Prussian Army.

He was mortified.

In the following year he moved to Pontoise

where he remained for the next ten or 11 years.

Paul Durand-Ruel also returned to France

and while continuing to sell the work of the Barbizon artists,

he also began to support the new generation of the Impressionists.

ACTOR AS DURAND-RUEL: Circumstances forced me to stop buying from

and helping out my new friends almost completely.

So to reach the public directly,

Degas, Monet, Renoir,

Sisley, Pissarro, Mademoiselle Morisot,

Guillaumin, Rouart, Lepic, and a few others

decided to form an officially incorporated company,

the Society of Independent Artists.

They held a show of their works in large premises

belonging to Nadar, the famous photographer,

at 35, Boulevard des Capucines.

Pissarro was one of the leading guiding forces

behind the first exhibition in 1874

and he was the only artist to exhibit

at all eight Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886.

That first exhibition we all remember

because it gave rise to the word "Impressionist".

This was a virulent criticism of a painting by Monet,

"Impression Soleil Levant' so the "Impression of a sunrise".

ACTOR AS CASTAGNARY: The common concept which united them as a group

and gives them a collective strength is the determination

not to search for a smooth execution,

to be satisfied with a certain general aspect.

Once the impression is captured, they declare their role terminated.

If one wants to characterise them

with a single word that explains their efforts,

one would have to create the new term of Impressionists.

They are "Impressionists" in the sense that they render

not a landscape, but the sensation produced by a landscape.

CLAIRE DURAND-RUEL:

OLGA OSADTSCHY: Camille Pissarro and Paul Cezanne had a very intimate

and intense friendship, and it was also a working relation.

At the beginning they might have started off

on a kind of mentor-mentee relationship at the very beginning,

but it was very clear that they were actually working as equals,

even though Pissarro was older and therefore kind of

more experienced than Cezanne was at the time.

When Cezanne arrived in Paris he was a similar outsider

as Pissarro himself was.

And Cezanne was ridiculed

because of his strong southern French.

He was a rather harsh character, if we were to believe the sources

and also his letters are full of swear words

and very direct language.

Pissarro immediately saw a kindred spirit

and Pissarro and Cezanne,

would really for a decade work side by side.

JOSEF HELFENSTEIN: They also had very, very long

and endless discussions about theory.

They benefited from new technology.

You know, it was the first time

that paint would come in tubes, in metal tubes.

So you could actually paint, you know, en plein air

and you could close these tubes again, and so on,

so you could paint faster.

These two really experimented and influenced one another in a very -

I think it's a very beautiful kind of artistic dialogue,

where Pissarro did not want to be the teacher.

He benefited as much from Cezanne's new way of observing nature

and painting nature as Cezanne benefited from Pissarro.

It's perhaps unsurprising, given that we hold

the Pissarro family archive

that among the most, sort of, moving and engaging works

within the collection that we hold here

are those of his family.

And there's none more engaging, none more speaking to him as a father

than the portrait of his young daughter, Jeanne Minette.

COLIN HARRISON: Pissarro painted six portraits of Minette,

the favourite of his children.

The one of 1873 shows her carrying a Japanese fan.

In the following year, Pissarro made the most moving of these portraits.

This last portrait of Minette is, of course, the most moving

because she was dying.

It also shows a much closer focus on her face.

She's staring at her father, who is devotedly painting her.

She's clutching a doll.

The unfinished nature of the picture suggests that she was already ill.

Her hair close-cropped.

This was apparently to give some relief in the heat.

Minette died at the age of eight and was ill for some time before that

and this is a portrait from that period,

and it's a painting by a father of a daughter

that he knows may not live.

Such a tender thing. She's looking at him, at us,

and it's impossible not to be moved by that as a painting.

(SOMBRE PIANO MUSIC)

The collectors of the 1870s, '80s,

weren't particularly interested in the countryside.

They were more interested in the scenes that were familiar to them.

So, the holiday spots on the Seine or the interiors of the opera

or the ballet and so forth.

And this, of course, was miles away from Pissarro's

dogged concentration on the rural France.

It's generally agreed by the artists themselves and by posterity

that in the early-1880s

the Impressionist movement was in crisis.

ACTOR AS ALBERT WOLFF: Five or six lunatics, including one woman,

a group of unfortunate creatures stricken with the folly of ambition,

have met there to show their work.

Try to make Monsieur Pissarro understand

that trees are not violet,

that the sky is not the colour of fresh butter,

that in no country do we see the things he paints

and that no mind can accept such aberrations!

Seriously, one ought to feel sorry for these lost souls.

HARRISON: Pissarro was looking for new motifs.

He first went in 1883 to Rouen, the first of four visits.

He made a number of works which he was able to sell to Durand-Ruel.

He painted them not in the way that Monet would,

in other words, looking at the cathedral

but actually looking out of his hotel windows

at the activities in the port.

These were real, bustling cityscapes.

By this date also, there was something of a crisis

in the Impressionist movement,

and Camille Pissarro, in particular, was looking at new ways of painting.

(GENTLE PIANO MUSIC)

PISSARRO: Looking towards Rouen I have before me

all the houses on the quays

lit by the morning sun.

In the background the stone bridge,

to the left the island with its houses, factories, boats, launches.

To the right a mass of pinnacles of all colours.

(BIRDSONG)

(WATER GENTLE RIPPLES)

JELLE IMKAMPE: The Pissarros were moving quite often

and then they ended up in this house in Eragny in 1884.

Julie really much liked it, Pissarro as well, but he was kind of a nomad.

He would have never thought about staying at a place.

He was on the go all the time

and that was important for him as an artist.

But for Julie it was quite the opposite.

She had a family to take care of

and for a family it might be important to stay at the same place.

And then there came this opportunity that the landlords

wanted to sell the house, and Julie said, "OK, let's do it."

Pissarro didn't want to do it.

So Julie went to Claude Monet to ask him for the money,

and he actually gave it to her,

and she bought the house behind her husband's back,

who was not delighted about it.

But facing the situation, what should he have done?

He loved the garden, she loved the garden,

so it was a great place for the family.

And I think they did a good thing staying there.

PISSARRO: My dear Lucien, yesterday I had a violent run-in

with Eugene Manet on the subject of Seurat and Signac.

The latter was present, as was Guillaumin.

You may be sure I rated Manet roundly.

Which will not please Renoir.

Anyhow, this is the point: I explained to Monsieur Manet,

who probably didn't understand anything I said,

that Seurat had something new to contribute

which these gentlemen, despite their talent, are unable to appreciate.

I am personally convinced

of the progressive character of his art

and certain that in time it will yield extraordinary results.

JELLE IMKAMPE: Neo-Impressionism basically describes

the combination of two techniques - Pointillism and Divisionism.

Pointillism refers to the brush stroke.

It means that you divide the gesture into tiny bits and pieces,

so you basically eliminate the gesture but have these dots,

which are not always dots, but also commas and other forms.

But, in theory, it is le point.

Divisionism, on the other hand,

describes that you divide the colour you want to create

into its different components, which you apply with these tiny dots,

and that also allows you to weave in complementary colours.

Pissarro took up the technique with enormous enthusiasm

and both he and Lucien insisted that the Neo-Impressionists

should show in a separate room at the eighth

and last exhibition of the Impressionists in 1886.

It was extremely time-consuming, labour intensive,

and it's notable that in the last four years of the 1880s,

his output plummeted.

Paul Durand-Ruel hates the way

the Neo-Impressionist painters are painting.

In the second half of the 1880s,

Monet starts to be successful with Impressionism.

Suddenly, Paul Durand-Ruel is able to sell off the paintings

to make money.

So he tells Pissarro, "OK, I really do not like what you're doing,

and I'm not going to be able to take your paintings

if you continue painting like that."

And that is the moment when Pissarro decides

to throw everything away and to start from scratch.

To basically completely begin from nothing.

So Pissarro has no choice but to switch to another dealer,

which is Theo van Gogh, the brother of Vincent van Gogh.

Theo van Gogh supports Pissarro and the other Neo-Impressionists,

buys his paintings and is trying to sell them to collectors.

PISSARRO: How is one to combine the purity and simplicity of the dot

with the full-bodiedness, suppleness, liberty, spontaneity

and freshness of sensation postulated by our Impressionist art?

This is the question which preoccupies me,

for the dot is meagre, lacking in body,

diaphanous, more monotonous than simple,

even in the Seurats, particularly in the Seurats.

In 1891, Seurat died at a very young age,

and this profoundly affected the Pissarro family.

It was also the year in which Theo van Gogh,

who had been dealing in Pissarro in a minor way in the 1880s, also died.

However, his rejection of pointillism,

of the divisionist technique

and his return to straightforward Impressionism

meant that Durand-Ruel was quite happy to sell his pictures

and gave him a solo exhibition in 1892,

which was really his first commercial success.

During the 1890s,

Pissarro was conscious that his time was running out.

He wrote frequently to members of his family

that he'd better get on with work

because he didn't have much time left.

(GENTLE PIANO MUSIC)

There is somehow a unity in the work produced between 1890

and his death in 1903,

which might be considered a late style.

He rented hotel rooms in cities, in mostly northern port cities

like Rouen and Dieppe and Le Havre and in Paris.

So he rented a room and started to paint from the window.

And that led to his series of cityscapes,

and it became the beginning of some kind of a financial success,

the city views.

The cityscapes.

The majority of people in Pissarro's paintings are, in fact, women,

so we naturally have to ask ourselves

in what way does he depict women?

If we compare Pissarro's depictions of women to Degas,

Cassatt or Renoir, for example,

what becomes clear is that Pissarro is not showing off their femininity,

whatever that means.

For example, he's not showing women pursuing parental tasks

or in a state of vulnerability.

He is showing women with their children many times,

but they're just working.

Many people do not know Pissarro was heavily involved with printing.

It was something that accompanied him for many, many years

and that he was very interested in.

What he was so interested about were new technical ways

of presenting Impressionism.

So we understand very well what Impressionism means on the canvas,

but it's a whole different thing to translate that technique,

that method to prints where you have very limited ways

of expressing atmosphere, for example.

You have you have other tools to express it differently.

So that was Pissarro's question about printmaking.

How can I achieve with my prints

what I have achieved with my paintings?

And he shared that interest with Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas.

And then in the 1890s, Pissarro has a studio in Eragny.

It's the first time that he has a proper studio

and it's in the old barn.

And that is the moment

when he decides to invest in a printing press.

And that is also an interest that he shares with his sons,

who are...who are making woodcuts

and that are very interested in printmaking as well.

CLAIRE DURAND-RUEL:

PISSARRO: My dear Lucien, I arrived in Rouen today from Paris.

I have a splendid view of the harbour.

I have effects of fog and mist, of rain, of the setting sun

and of grey weather,

motifs of bridges seen from every angle,

quays with boats.

But what interests me especially

is a motif of the iron bridge in the wet,

with much traffic, carriages, pedestrians,

workers on the quays, boats, smoke, mist in the distance,

the whole scene fraught with animation and life.

COLIN HARRISON: Pissarro was already 70 in 1900,

but his most productive period, in fact followed in 1901, 1902.

Pissarro moved into an apartment in the Place Dauphine,

but he was also travelling between Paris, Eragny, Dieppe

and other resorts, painting constantly,

all the while producing a most remarkable late flowering of work.

An extraordinary explosion of productivity.

He also painted this final self-portrait,

which in some senses is a reflection

of the great age that he was feeling.

Of all the self-portraits,

this is the one that shows Pissarro at his most profound,

looking at himself, but also looking at his past and his achievement.

PISSARRO: I will do my best to go quietly on with the life

that has been allotted to me, by doing as much work as I can,

for the thread that holds me to this earth has nearly run out.

(BIRDS CHIRRUPING)

Whether he'd caught a cold,

whether there was something more seriously wrong...

Pissarro's death happened rather unexpectedly.

His funeral was held at Pere Lachaise,

and the accounts of it show that everybody who was anybody in Paris,

in intellectual and artistic circles, attended.

CLAIRE DURAND-RUEL:

Pissarro's legacy is, frankly, impossible to quantify.

And he is, to my mind, the most sincere,

the most uncompromising of all the Impressionist painters.

ACTOR AS GEORGES LECOMTE: The man was as great as the artist.

The beauty of his existence has the same harmonious tenderness

that delights us in his work.

Nowhere more than in the presence of Camille Pissarro

did one have the impression

that work is one of the essential functions of life,

and that, far from being an effort, it is, on the contrary, a pleasure.

Those who did not have the joy of knowing him,

love him nevertheless through his magnificent work,

into which he put all of his great soul.

(DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC)

(MUSIC BUILDS)

(MUSIC ENDS)

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