Pissarro paintings, Camille, Lucien art, Georges Manzana Pissarro gallery, Felix Pissarro, Ludovic-Rodo, Paulemile, Orovida, Hugues Claude, Yvon, Lélia

Camille Pissarro was one of the most influential members of the French Impressionist movement, not only as an artist but also as a teacher, and he was the only artist to participate in all eight Impressionist exhibitions.
At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, Camille moved to England. With Monet he painted a series of landscapes around South-East London as well as studying English landscape painters in the museums. When he returned home to Louveciennes a year later, Camille discovered that all but 40 of the 1500 paintings he had left there - almost twenty years’ work – had been vandalised.
In 1872 Camille settled in Pontoise where he remained for the next ten years, gathering a close circle of friends around him. Gauguin was among the many artists to visit him there and Cézanne, who lived nearby, came for long periods to work and learn. These were also the years of the Impressionist group exhibitions in which Camille played a major role, but which earned him much criticism for his art. While mainly interested in landscape, he introduced figures (generally peasants conducting their rural occupations) and animals into his work and these became the focal point of the composition.
In the last years of his life Camille divided his time between Paris, Rouen, Le Havre and his home in Eragny and painted many series of different aspects of those cities, with varying light and weather effects. Many of these paintings are considered amongst his best and make a fitting finale to his long and eventful career.
When Camille Pissarro died in the autumn of 1903 he had finally started to gain public recognition and today, of course, his work can be found in many of the most important museums and private collections throughout the world.
Lucien Pissarro was skilled as a painter in oils and watercolour, a wood engraver and a lithographer. In 1885, Camille and Lucien met Paul Signac and Georges Seurat, and their friendship with those artists was very influential. When Lucien participated with his father in the eighth Impressionist exhibition of 1886, their experiments with the Divisionism of Signac and Seurat were apparent.
A visit to England in 1883 marked the beginning of a long association with the country. On his return to France in the spring of 1884, his activities rapidly expanded and he became interested in the making of children’s books, studying the technique of wood engraving and learning the process of printing colour blocks. He moved to England permanently in 1890, married English girl, Esther Bensusan in 1892 and in 1894 by founded the Eragny Press in Hammersmith, which published limited editions of beautifully illustrated books. Several titles were published between 1894 and 1914, the first being ‘Queen of the Fishes’.
Georges Manzana Pissarro studied with his father from a very early age and, like Lucien, he spent his formative years surrounded by distinguished artists of the Impressionist movement, such as Monet, Cézanne, Renoir and Gauguin, all of whom frequented the Pissarro home. At his father's side he learnt not only to handle brush and pencil but also to observe and to love nature. Thus steeped in tradition and subjected to these diverse influences, Manzana turned out to be a prolific and versatile artist, producing work in oil, pastel and watercolour.
As a young man he adopted his father’s purely Impressionist style and produced a series of landscapes around Pontoise and Eragny. However, around 1906 he progressed beyond that and went in search of other means of expression via the design of furniture and decorative objects. The influence of Gauguin’s exotic native scenes from Tahiti and Martinique certainly contributed to the development of Manzana’s Orientalism, which at this time began to manifest itself in some of his paintings by his experimenting with gold, silver and copper paint.
Felix Pissarro affectionately known to his family as Titi, was born in Pontoise in 1874, the year of the first Impressionist exhibition.
The third son of Camille Pissarro, Félix was a painter, etcher and caricaturist, and from an early age his work demonstrated great strength and originality. This prompted his father to comment that of all his artist sons, Félix undoubtedly had the most talent and promise of becoming a major artist.
It is therefore perhaps one of life’s cruel ironies that Félix contracted tuberculosis and died in England at the age of 23, before he was able to even begin realising his full potential, and in a posthumous article, Octave Mirbeau lamented his passing whilst attributing to him “…uncommon talent, fervent imagination, originality, passion, vision, spontaneity and, above all, natural aptitude…”, qualities which he was adamant would have turned Félix into a truly great artist.
Ludovic Rodo Pissarro - The impact of Camille’s art and teaching on Rodo was obviously considerable, and his artistic production encompassed a wide range of media, including oil painting, tempera, watercolour, gouache, wood engraving, drawing and lithography. He also exhibited regularly at the Salon des Indépendents over a forty year period.The impact of Camille’s art and teaching on Rodo was obviously considerable, and his artistic production encompassed a wide range of media, including oil painting, tempera, watercolour, gouache, wood engraving, drawing and lithography. He also exhibited regularly at the Salon des Indépendents over a forty year period.
Paulémile Pissarro - Camille’s youngest son, was born in Eragny in 1884. He was bought up in the artistic environment of the family home there and, encouraged by his father, began drawing at an early age. Paulémile’s godfather was Claude Monet who became his teacher and close friend, particularly after Camille’s death in 1903.
During the late 1920s and early 1930s Paulémile reached the peak of his artistic development, arriving at the individual style for which he is now best known. In 1930 he visited an area called Swiss Normandy and instantly fell in love with this part of the Calvados region, and especially with the River Orne that runs through the valley adjacent to the villages of Clécy and le Vey. The combination of blue hills and green meadows, separated by the calm waters of the river, offered Paulémile a new setting for his work and, in 1935, he moved to Clécy with his second wife Yvonne Beaupel, where he remained until his death.
In 1967 he had his first one-man show in the United States at Wally Findlay Galleries in New York. This led to widespread recognition and a degree of professional success that few Pissarro artists had known during their lifetime. Since his death in 1972, Paulémile’s paintings have been exhibited around the world, and interest in his work continues to grow.
Orovida Pissarro the only child of Lucien and Esther Pissarro, was the first woman in the Pissarro family to become a professional artist and the first Pissarro of her generation to take up painting. Born in Epping, England, in 1893, she lived and worked predominantly in London, where she was a prominent member of several British arts clubs and societies.
Orovida's most distinctive works are her paintings of the 1920’s and 30’s in gouache (she called her mixture bodycolour) and tempera, applied in thin, delicate washes to silk, linen, paper or gold leaf, and embellished with brocade borders. These elegant and richly decorative works generally depict non-western subjects; for example Mongolian horse-riders, African dancers, and Persian princes, often engaged in culture-specific activities such as dancing or hunting rituals.
Throughout her life, she was aware of the mixed blessing of having famous artists in the family; not only a grandfather and father, but four uncles as well, and towards the end of her life she was instrumental in developing the Pissarro family archive that her mother had established at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
Hughes Claude Pissarro also known professionally as Isaac Pomié, is the grandson of the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro and son of Paulemile Pissarro. Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine and enveloped in an artistic environment, he inevitably spent his childhood and youth with brushes in hand. Carrying on a family tradition established by Camille Pissarro, his father frequently took Hugues on painting excursions, accompanied by his numerous artist friends, and these proved formative for him.
Throughout his teaching career he was also a prolific artist exhibiting on several occasions in Paris and London, and like many of his family predecessors, the scope of his work and talent is wide ranging; from engraver, lithographer, publisher and landscape painter to portraitist. He was even commissioned by the White House in 1959 to paint President Eisenhower.
Splitting his time between Ireland and Normandy, and working in self-imposed virtual solitude, the choice to stay within the confines of his own physical world has not precluded him from keeping abreast of events and developments in the world of art. Indeed, he is a valued and respected contributor to several art publications.
Yvon Pissarro (Vey) The son of Paulémile and grandson of Camille Pissarro, Yvon was born in December 1937. At a very early age, his independent spirit and readiness to criticise made him an out-and-out rebel who did not want to obey the orders of his family.
During national service he became friendly with the poet James Sacré, and on his return to civilian life he spent time at his parents’ home in order to readjust to being free. He took advantage of this period of free time to produce and print - using his father’s line engraving press - around fifteen woodcuts for a collection of poems by James Sacré, La transparence du Pronom ‘Elle’ (Transparency of the pronoun ’she’) . Despite the tendency of the age to desert the techniques of the past that are built around the concept of a craftsman and his skill, like so many artists before him, Yvon devoted himself to drawing. He did not mind that for some it was a sterile repetition of what artists used to do and Yvon knew he was taking a chance in persisting in a rather fatalistic way with this passion. In his keenness to master the skills of the past, and muster them against the objections of the critics and the works of his contemporaries, he covered large sheets of white paper with pencil drawings.
Due to family reasons Yvon stopped drawing for more than a decade, and after leaving Nice, he now lives in a village near Montpellier where he continues to dedicate his life to his art.
Lélia Pissarro was born in Paris, the third and youngest child of the artist Hugues-Claude Pissarro and Katia, an art-dealer.
From infancy until the age of eleven she was entrusted to the care of her grand-parents, Paulémile Pissarro and his wife Yvonne, in Clécy, Normandy, where her interest in drawing and painting was nurtured by her grandfather. Paulémile taught her the fundamental impressionist and post-impressionist techniques, as had been taught to him by his father Camille, and so began Lélia’s love for figurative art. Before his death, Paulémile made Lélia promise to retain her family name, to continue painting and to make art her life. She sold her first canvas to Wally Findlay, a New York art dealer, when she was only 4 years of age!
Lélia moved to London in 1988 following her marriage to art dealer David Stern, and in 1999 Lélia co-founded the “Sorteval Press”, a group of artists dedicated to developing their skills and techniques in etching and printmaking. Their first exhibition took place at the Mall Gallery in London, and the artist’s efforts ensured a highly successful first exhibition.
Following the tradition of her great-grandfather, grandfather and father, Lélia has played an important role in continuing this artistic dynasty by participating in a series of exhibitions entitled Pissarro – The Four Generations. These exhibitions have been mounted in London, Tel Aviv, five major museums in Japan and the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.