Camille Pissarro at the Museum Barberini

Camille Pissarro | Boulevard Montmartre, Twilight, 1897

In a series of fourteen paintings Camille Pissarro focused on the Boulevard Montmartre in the center of Paris.

From his room in the Grand Hôtel de Russie, with the opera building behind him, he had a view of the busy street on which twenty thousand carriages rattled by every day, past the expensive shops and the popular Café Tortoni.

This picture shows the boulevard with fresh green trees in springtime. | Source: © Museum Barberini

Camille Pissarro | View of Bazincourt, Sunset, 1892

After a short period dedicated to Pointillism, Camille Pissarro gave up this time-consuming technique around 1890.

He returned to a freer style of painting that enabled him to capture impressions of light and weather conditions more quickly.

Here the intense brightness of the setting sun lends a celebratory atmosphere to the evening scene. | Source: © Museum Barberini

Camille Pissarro | The Hills at Le Chou, Pontoise, 1882

An unusual view of a hillside, seen diagonally in the foreground, combines an extreme closeup with pictorial depth.

With a nuanced palette of colors and minute brushstrokes, Camille Pissarro created a pulsating texture that evokes the lush variety of flowers and grasses of a summer meadow. | Source: © Museum Barberini

Camille Pissarro | Garden and Henhouse at Octave Mirbeau's, Les Damps, 1892

In September 1892 Camille Pissarro spent two weeks at the country home of writer Octave Mirbeau in Les Damps in the northern French department of Eure. In addition to his activity as a novelist and playwright, Mirbeau had also distinguished himself as an art critic, particularly as a connoisseur of Impressionism.

Pissarro, like his fellow artist Claude Monet, was friendly with Mirbeau and maintained a lively correspondence with him.

Both men were sympathetic to the ideas of the anarchist movement, which they sought to embody in their literary and painterly work.

During his stay with Mirbeau, Pissarro executed four large-scale views of his friend’s garden—a passion the artist shared with Monet, with whom he discussed questions of modern horticulture. | Source: © Museum Barberini

Pissarro’s painting shows the floral splendor of the garden in the radiant light of an autumn afternoon. Powerful accents of red, pink, rose, yellow, and orange stand out in a composition dominated by green. Motifs suggesting human activity - the trellis and the chicken coop - are eclipsed by the luxuriant vegetation, into which the viewer enters both visually and metaphorically through the narrow, rose-colored path to the right.

At the time this painting was made, the motif of the garden had become well-established among the Impressionists as a symbol for perfect harmony between man and nature - a core idea of the anarchistic literature with which both Mirbeau and Pissarro were familiar.

Later, proponents of Neo-Impressionism such as Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross would also embrace this theme in their works.

In March 1893 Pissarro’s painting, along with his three other views of Mirbeau’s garden, appeared in a major solo exhibition in the Paris gallery of Paul Durand-Ruel, where they were exhibited under the title Série de jardins. | Source: © Museum Barberini

Hoar-Frost, Peasant Girl Making a Fire, 1888

In the 1880s Camille Pissarro painted idealized images of rural life.

Here, two peasant children are warming themselves at a brushwood fire on a cold winter’s morning.

The transparent volumes of the clouds of smoke consist of a grid of brushstrokes, while the landscape and figures are painted with dots in the style of Neo-Impressionism. | Source: © Museum Barberini