Word: pissarro
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...Pissarro was one of the avant-garde's oak-tree uncles: a man of enormous solidity and forthrightness, blunt in speech, loyal to his friends and open to younger artists. He loved to organize, teach, and argue and work with other painters, and the list of artists who owed him some part of their self-knowledge was long...
Though immersed in the metropolitan culture of France, Pissarro lived at an angle to it. He was not only an immigrant -he had been born and raised on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, the son of a well-off storekeeper-he was also a Jew. In this sense he was twice a stranger in France, and his clan loyalty, his commitment to the tiny republic of the family, his extreme probity and political radicalism were connected, one may surmise, to his sense of outsidership. More than anything else, he loved painting...
That was why he could continue to praise Degas, while in the wake of the Dreyfus affair, Degas, like the anti-Semite he was, brutally snubbed him. Painting could not heal everything, but it represented for Pissarro a corrected world, all relations manifest, all unities achieved, hopeful, measurable and decent...
...whole tradition of French landscape runs through Pissarro's work. He is a link between the weighty, materialist vision of Courbet and the molecular analyses of impressionism, and the best of his landscapes possess an unremitting gravity of construction. Everything in a painting like The "Côte du Jallais," Pontoise, 1867, is, so to speak, freighted with scruple, rendered dense by inspection-the blue air and clouds no less than the swatches of plowed and seeded field and the massed trees. Its low tones and construction by horizontal bands make one think of Corot, but its directness...
Through the 1870s, Pissarro's surfaces would become more agitated, broken and silky. In one of his small masterpieces, The Climbing Path, L'Hermitage, Pontoise, 1875, he gave a view of roofs through a dappled grid of tree trunks the sort of beautiful abstruseness one associates with Cézanne. But always there remained an Arcadian sense of order-a confidence in reasonable appetite, one of whose physical manifestations was the fruitful, vaporous and lovingly cultivated landscape of the Seine-et-Oise...