The Honest Eye: Camille Pissarro's Impressionism

"Camille Pissarro was a father figure to many of the Impressionist artists, yet only in more recent times has his own oeuvre been more studied and appreciated in greater depth. In recent years, exhibitions like those in Williamstown and San Francisco, Ordrupgaard near Copenhagen, Basel, and Oxford have focused more strongly on Pissarro. The retrospective in Potsdam and Denver builds on these important stations in the research on Pissarro. With the seven works by Pissarro in the Hasso Plattner Collection as a point of departure and the outstanding collaboration of the Denver Art Museum, we show how Pissarro’s Impressionism is closely tied to the group, but at the same time is also unique."

“It is Pissarro’s conception of the landscape, above all, that stands out among the Impressionists. While painters like Monet or Renoir usually showed the city and country as the setting for bourgeois leisure activities, Pissarro points our gaze to the way in which ordinary people shape and influence a variety of everyday landscapes—through the life and work of the individual in harmony with nature as well as through the movement of crowds in the metropolis. He depicts his wife Julie cultivating the garden, shows an experienced peasant woman starting a fire even with damp wood, and paints carriages stuck in rush hour traffic on a boulevard in Paris. One of Pissarro’s central artistic concerns was to show the beauty in the small things of everyday life.”