Camille Pissarro Picture Study Aid and Art Prints

Camille Pissarro Picture Study Aid

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.

The intention of this Camille Pissarro Picture Study Aid is to equip the home educator with some basic facts and understanding of a sampling of the artist’s work. It is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis or study of each piece or a complete biography of the artist.

About picture study, Ms. Mason recommended keeping learning as simple as possible, especially in the younger years, and put extra emphasis on the images by themselves.

There is 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. (vol 6 pg 216)

Definite teaching is out of the question; suitable ideas are easily given, and a thoughtful love of Art inspired by simple natural talk over the picture at which the child is looking. (PR Article “Picture Talks”)

…we begin now to understand that art is not to be approached by such an acadamised road. It is of the spirit, and in ways of the spirit must we make our attempt. We recognise that the power of appreciating art and of producing to some extent an interpretation of what one sees is as universal as intelligence, imagination, nay, speech, the power of producing words. But there must be knowledge and, in the first place, not the technical knowledge of how to produce, but some reverent knowledge of what has been produced; that is, children should learn pictures, line by line, group by group, by reading, not books, but pictures themselves. A friendly picture-dealer supplies us with half a dozen beautiful little reproductions of the work of some single artist, term by term. After a short story of the artist’s life and a few sympathetic words about his trees or his skies, his river-paths or his figures, the little pictures are studied one at a time; that is, children learn, not merely to see a picture but to look at it, taking in every detail.” (vol 6 pg 214)

Picture Study Aids are 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. (vol 6 pg 43)