Lucien Pissarro
1863 - 1944
Wotton-under-Edge
Watercolour, ink and coloured crayon on paper
14.6 x 18.5 cm (5 ³/₄ x 7 ¹/₄ inches)
Signed with monogram and dated 1920, lower left
Inscribed lower right, Wotton-under-Edge
14.6 x 18.5 cm (5 ³/₄ x 7 ¹/₄ inches)
Signed with monogram and dated 1920, lower left
Inscribed lower right, Wotton-under-Edge
Private Collection, London
Colchester, The Minories, The R.A. Bevan Collection, July - August 1975, no. 119
Sudbury, Gainsborough's House, The Bevan Collection: A Selection of Paintings by British Artists including the Camden Group, 5 - 27 August 1978, no. 40
Sudbury, Gainsborough's House, The Bevan Collection: A Selection of Paintings by British Artists including the Camden Group, 5 - 27 August 1978, no. 40
This work is accompanied by a letter of authenticity from Colin Harrison, Senior Curator of European Art at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
This original artwork by Lucien Pissarro is available for immediate purchase.
This original artwork by Lucien Pissarro is available for immediate purchase.
Lucien Pissarro
biography
Lucien Pissarro, born on 20 February 1863, was the eldest son of Camille Pissarro. Taught from a young age by his father, and in the frequent company of Cézanne, Gauguin and Monet, he was drawn naturally towards an artistic career. He is best known as a landscape painter, but he was also a printmaker, wood engraver and printer of fine books, and occasionally painted still lifes and portraits of his family.
Lucien first visited England in 1870, when the family fled the Franco-Prussian War, and this marked the beginning of a lasting attachment to the country. Until his permanent move in 1890 he worked in France as a landscape painter and book illustrator, meeting and working alongside painters including Paul Signac, Georges Seurat and Vincent van Gogh. Moving in both Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist circles, he exhibited Pointillist paintings withCamille in the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886. In the same year he was among the first artists to exhibit at the Salon des Indépendants as a Neo-Impressionist.
Despite his close relationship with his father, as revealed in their correspondence, Lucien showed a marked independence of mind in his approach to art. Although he was trained by Camille, the influence between the two was reciprocal: through his friendships with Seurat and Signac, Lucien encouraged his father to experiment with Pointillism, a method characteristic of the Neo-Impressionist group.
Lucien settled permanently in England in 1890 and became a British citizen in 1916. The move allowed him greater freedom to pursue his interest in book illustration and printing, and there he and his wife Esther established the Éragny Press, named after the village where his family had lived since 1884. The press was notable for the beauty of its books and contributed to the development of European book art, while Lucien's illustrations for these volumes demonstrate his command of colour.
Lucien nevertheless always considered painting, and landscape painting in particular, his primary concern. Continuing the tradition of the Impressionists, he was a plein-air painter who preferred to work outdoors and study his subject directly from nature, and his landscapes reveal a fascination with the effects of weather and light. The critic Frank Rutter described him as a master of colour, writing in 1922: “there is no man living who has a more profound knowledge of the science of colour, or a more discriminating eye for its observation in nature.” Rutter was equally struck by Lucien's respect for nature itself: “Each canvas is wrought with a quiet perfection that conceals its art and is eloquent of the tender emotion which the loveliness of nature inspires in the artist.”
Rutter's praise reflects the way in which Lucien's contemporaries responded to his combination of English and French artistic traditions. He became associated with groups that drew inspiration from the Impressionists, exhibiting with the New English Art Club in 1904, the Fitzroy Street Group in 1907 and the Camden Town Group in 1911. To his English contemporaries Lucien represented a direct link to the Impressionist masters, and his influence can be recognised in the work of British artists such as Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman and Walter Sickert. Writing in 1914, they acknowledged that: “Mr Pissarro, holding the exceptional position at once of an original talent, and of the pupil of his father, the authoritative depository of a mass of inherited knowledge and experience, has certainly served us as a guide.”
Lucien's first solo exhibition took place at the Carfax Gallery in May 1913, and his work has since been shown in numerous exhibitions and galleries. His estate was given to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where a permanent collection of his work is housed today. His work is also held by many major museums in England, as well as by the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery of Australia and several museums in the United States.
Lucien first visited England in 1870, when the family fled the Franco-Prussian War, and this marked the beginning of a lasting attachment to the country. Until his permanent move in 1890 he worked in France as a landscape painter and book illustrator, meeting and working alongside painters including Paul Signac, Georges Seurat and Vincent van Gogh. Moving in both Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist circles, he exhibited Pointillist paintings withCamille in the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886. In the same year he was among the first artists to exhibit at the Salon des Indépendants as a Neo-Impressionist.
Despite his close relationship with his father, as revealed in their correspondence, Lucien showed a marked independence of mind in his approach to art. Although he was trained by Camille, the influence between the two was reciprocal: through his friendships with Seurat and Signac, Lucien encouraged his father to experiment with Pointillism, a method characteristic of the Neo-Impressionist group.
Lucien settled permanently in England in 1890 and became a British citizen in 1916. The move allowed him greater freedom to pursue his interest in book illustration and printing, and there he and his wife Esther established the Éragny Press, named after the village where his family had lived since 1884. The press was notable for the beauty of its books and contributed to the development of European book art, while Lucien's illustrations for these volumes demonstrate his command of colour.
Lucien nevertheless always considered painting, and landscape painting in particular, his primary concern. Continuing the tradition of the Impressionists, he was a plein-air painter who preferred to work outdoors and study his subject directly from nature, and his landscapes reveal a fascination with the effects of weather and light. The critic Frank Rutter described him as a master of colour, writing in 1922: “there is no man living who has a more profound knowledge of the science of colour, or a more discriminating eye for its observation in nature.” Rutter was equally struck by Lucien's respect for nature itself: “Each canvas is wrought with a quiet perfection that conceals its art and is eloquent of the tender emotion which the loveliness of nature inspires in the artist.”
Rutter's praise reflects the way in which Lucien's contemporaries responded to his combination of English and French artistic traditions. He became associated with groups that drew inspiration from the Impressionists, exhibiting with the New English Art Club in 1904, the Fitzroy Street Group in 1907 and the Camden Town Group in 1911. To his English contemporaries Lucien represented a direct link to the Impressionist masters, and his influence can be recognised in the work of British artists such as Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman and Walter Sickert. Writing in 1914, they acknowledged that: “Mr Pissarro, holding the exceptional position at once of an original talent, and of the pupil of his father, the authoritative depository of a mass of inherited knowledge and experience, has certainly served us as a guide.”
Lucien's first solo exhibition took place at the Carfax Gallery in May 1913, and his work has since been shown in numerous exhibitions and galleries. His estate was given to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where a permanent collection of his work is housed today. His work is also held by many major museums in England, as well as by the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery of Australia and several museums in the United States.
Lucien Pissarro
biography
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