Pierre-Auguste Renoir
by Rayfield, Susan
Renoir by Schneider, Bruno F
Renoir : life and works
by Joannides, Paul
Renoir
by Gaunt, William
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MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS |
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Camille Pissarro
While Claude Monet and Sisley both preferred the ever-changing reflections of water
as subjects, Pissarro liked painting dry land. He tends to concentrate less on evanescent colour effects and more on construction and form. He has something of Millet about him in his preference for rural subjects and country life, although he uses a typically fragmented Impressionist technique. Monet, Sisley, Renoir and others among their friends all seem to have put up their easels wherever the fancy took them, if they happened to like the view or the particular light effects. Pissarro on the other hand used to choose his subjects deliberately; he liked painting cultivated fields and villages, country roads leading to grassy meadows, orchards and so on. Like Millet, he took an interest in the men who tilled the ground as well as in the countryside itself, so we often find his pictures include figures of peasants and domestic animals. Zola wrote that 'in his paintings you can hear the earth's deep voices'. Because of his love for the earth he always tended to set his horizons very high up in the picture, just as Millet did, leaving very little room for sky; it may be partly because of this liking for solid not ephemeral things that he attracted Cezanne so much; indeed they often worked together, and Pissarro introduced Cezanne to the Impressionist vision and technique. Pissarro was a convinced socialist, and because of this, tended to make the figures in his pictures peasants, and to paint market scenes. His independence and political convictions make him stand out as a personality among his friends in the group. Staunch supporter of the Impressionist 'revolution', he was the only one
to show his work in all eight Impressionist exhibitions, from 1874 to 1886; in fact he used to say 'My own life is bound up with the life of Impressionism'.
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PICTURE ABOVE
Fox Hill, Upper Norwood, 1870
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