Camille Pissarro Picture Study Aid and Art Prints for Homeschoolers

Camille Pissarro Picture Study - ahumbleplace.com

To read more about Charlotte Mason picture study and to see the other Picture Study Aids I offer, click here.

Everything is beautiful, all that matters is to be able to interpret.
Camille Pissarro

I think it is safe to say that art was Camille Pissarro’s life-long passion. Born on the island of St. Thomas to a Jewish family that had experienced its fair share of hardship and drama over the years, Pissarro started drawing at a young age. Even while going down to the dock to oversee incoming shipments for his family’s shop, he brought his sketchbook with him, recording his observations of the world around him as much as possible. Later, in his early 20s, he left the family altogether and traveled to Venezuela with a Danish painter he had only just recently met to pursue his art.

After moving to Paris in 1855, he slowly added to his cache of friends the names of artists which have been immortalized as part of the Impressionist movement. He was the oldest of the group of painters, many of whom lovingly referred to him as “Father Pissarro” and often looked to him for advice. He did not approach these relationships with a lofty condescension, however, despite his more advanced years, and took inspiration from their art and ideas as well.

Throughout his life, he struggled to provide for his ever-growing family, but kept on in his pursuit of art despite the hardships. He felt the importance of art visceraly, and capturing beauty as he saw it in the world was almost an obsession for him. Though it took him many years to make a name for himself in the art world, in his later years, the effort finally paid off, and he is now ranked among the most well-known of the Impressionist painters.

Through Tuesday, March 18th, the Camille Pissarro Picture Study Aid is on sale! You can get the Picture Study Aid and Art prints set for $15.99 ($3 off the regular price of $18.99) and the PDF for $11.99 ($2 off the regular price of $13.99). This offer does not include the picture study prints and is only valid while supplies last.

Camille Pissarro Picture Study Aid and Art Prints

I’m excited to announce that I have a new Picture Study Aid covering the art of Camille Pissarro, along with accompanying fine art prints, now available! Included in this 29-page Picture Study Aid is a summary of the life and artistic inspirations of the Danish/French, Impressionist, and Jewish painter Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), key topics for seven of his works (see below), printable versions of the pieces covered in the PDF version, and a brief discussion about Charlotte Mason’s ideas and methods for implementing picture study at different ages.

The pieces* discussed are:

Two Women Chatting by the Sea, St. Thomas (1856 – National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)
Jalais Hill, Pontoise (1867 – The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
The Conversation, Louveciennes (1870 – Emil Bührle Collection, Zürich, Switzerland)
The Woods at Marly (1871 – Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid)
Washerwoman, Study (1880 – The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
Haymaking, Éragny (1887 – Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)
Boulevard Montmartre, Spring (1897 – Private collection)

*AmblesideOnline users, please note that these are not all the same pieces as those selected for the AmblesideOnline artist rotation.

You can also find books for further reading about Pissarro in the Living Art Book Archive.

I include a brief overview of Charlotte Mason picture study at the beginning of the Picture Study Aid; however, I have also written posts here on the blog about why it is important and how we do it in our home and homeschool co-op.

You can get your copy at the link at the end of the post!

Caveats

This guide is by no means an exhaustive analysis or study of each piece, which is intentional. I tried to keep it all very simple in the spirit of there being:

…no talk about schools of painting, little about style; consideration of these matters comes in later life, the first and most important thing is to know the pictures themselves. As in a worthy book we leave the author to tell his own tale, so do we trust a picture to tell its tale through the medium the artist gave it. In the region of art as else-where we shut out the middleman.
CHARLOTTE MASON (VOL 6 PG 216)

Instead, this Picture Study Aid is meant to offer basic information about the artists as well as ready answers should your student ask about a particular aspect of a piece and the explanation isn’t readily evident. Ms. Mason emphasized not focusing on strict academic discourse when doing picture study but rather simply exposing students to the art itself:

His education should furnish him with whole galleries of mental pictures, pictures by great artists old and new;––…––in fact, every child should leave school with at least a couple of hundred pictures by great masters hanging permanently in the halls of his imagination, to say nothing of great buildings, sculpture, beauty of form and colour in things he sees. Perhaps we might secure at least a hundred lovely landscapes too,––sunsets, cloudscapes, starlight nights. At any rate he should go forth well furnished because imagination has the property of magical expansion, the more it holds the more it will hold.
CHARLOTTE MASON (VOL 6 PG 43)