Word: pissarros
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...dramatic purple, dark blue, blood-red patch of the group of disciples, on that terrible emerald-green sea ... what an inspired conception!" He had read about Impressionism, too, but imagined it to be simply the use of lighter tones. In Paris he discovered such older painters as Monet and Pissarro, and met the young avant-garde of the day: Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, Signac, Gauguin, Bernard. His old palette went out the window ("Last year I painted almost nothing but flowers," he wrote in 1887, "so I could get used to colors other than gray.") He experimented with Impressionist brushstrokes...
When Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Pierre Renoir and a handful of other artists - most of them French - began to abandon the formal rules that had dominated painting until the mid-19th century, they brought into the art world a new spontaneity, luminosity and richness. Their revolutionary way of looking at landscapes, gardens and scenes of leisure had particular resonance in a distant land that, a century earlier, embraced some revolutionary French ideas about politics. "I hated conventional art," said Mary Cassatt, a leading American artist of the 19th and 20th centuries. "When I joined the Impressionists, I began...
...Experimenting with unique subject matter allowed impressionists to stretch the limits of still life painting, and the exhibition successfully illustrates this breadth. The range of artists is also extraordinary, from those known for still lifes like Fantin-Latour and Cézanne, to those known for landscapes like Monet, Pissarro and Sisley, to those known for figure painting like Degas, Cassatt and Caillebotte...
...example, Walcott portrays Pissarro's choice--to abandon St. Thomas for France and high European culture--in different ways. At one point the poet gives his blessing: "There was no treachery if he turned his back/on the sun that plunges fissures in the fronds/of the feathery immortelles, on a dirt track/with a horse cart for an equestrian bronze." But later Walcott wonders whether Pissarro's Impressionist renderings of French scenery did not involve treachery after all: "Are all the paintings then falsifications/of his real origins, was his island betrayed?/Instead of linden walks and railway stations,/ our palms and windmills...
...eerie moment Walcott imagines himself actually being sketched, a century or so earlier, by Pissarro: "I felt a line enclose my lineaments/and those of other shapes around me too." The poet sees himself, under Pissarro's watchful eye, "keeping my position as a model does/a young slave mixed and newly manumitted." How, Walcott muses, can he be so swayed by the art of Veronese and Tiepolo when people of his color appear in it, if at all, only on the margins, as servants or attendants, Moors holding the leashes of white wolfhounds...