Pissarro, landscape, vision, and tradition.

Paul Cezanne once remarked that if Camille Pissarro "had gone on painting as he was doing in 1870, he would have been the strongest of us all."(1) Cezanne did not make clear why he found Pissarro's early work so compelling, but he implied that its strength was not sustained in the artist's subsequent production. This essay explores what it was that made Pissarro's pictures appear so forceful to someone like Cezanne and what it was that Pissarro wanted his pictures to do in the early and middle years of the 1870s, a period in the artist's career that deserves more attention than it has hitherto received.

In 1880, Pissarro turned away from landscape painting and toward figure painting. Martha Ward has argued that this turn was propelled by the artist's desire to produce a work that qualified as a tableau, a fully realized and self-sufficient painting.(2) Both Pissarro and his critics thought that the figure was necessary to the production of such a tableau, or chef d'oeuvre, and their interest in the figure can be seen in terms of a return to criteria that originated in writing about theater and art in the eighteenth century in France.(3) This return might be characterized as a rejection or revision on Pissarro's part of his own artistic past; what motivated the artist in the 1880s, namely, the desire for a tableau (the same desire that led Claude Monet to the series), was not precisely what had motivated him in earlier years.4 During the 1870s, painters and critics were able to set aside the issue of the tableau while, importantly, not forgetting. it entirely.(5) With this bracketing, made possible in part by Edouard Manet, or rather, by the redefinition or transformation of what Manet's aims were perceived to be, Impressionists like Pissarro, Monet, and Alfred Sisley, the landscapists of the group, came to think about picture making in terms of an alternative (but not wholly novel) set of criteria. In the 1870s, Pissarro, especially, transformed his thinking about how paintings were asked to represent and about how they demanded to be viewed, and his critics, both those who liked his painting and those who were disturbed by it, understood what he was trying to do. I say transformed because it is the case that Pissarro did not reject or attempt to forget the past; he involved himself in the history of landscape painting in France and made sure to manufacture an alternative to this history, one not wholly bound to its aims. In so doing, he pursued a practice situated somewhere between that of his precursors and that of his Impressionist colleagues, a practice tied to criteria of the past even as it struggled to reinvent them. As we shall see, Pissarro made use of what was characterized at the time as the partialness of landscape, its insufficiency and its inability to ever achieve the status of tableau, in order to produce pictures that reexamined the relation between painting and beholder. In these pictures, described by Pissarro's critics as compelling and successful works of art, the artist found a way to represent what he imagined to be the relationship of sight to embodiment and insisted not on instantaneous intelligibility but on the difficulty and duration of vision. Pissarro painted in a variety of manners during the period under discussion; despite their diversity, the pictures examined in this essay make similar claims about perceptual experience and must be understood in terms of a sustained exploration on Pissarro's part of vision and the possibility of its representation.

In broad terms, then, this essay addresses the turn to landscape painting in the late 1860s and early 1870s by Pissarro and his Impressionist colleagues, painters who were repeatedly called disciples of Manet, an artist intensely interested in the figure and seemingly uninterested in landscape painting as a viable genre in and of itself.(6) More specifically, it focuses on the early career of Pissarro and examines a select number of his works dating from the 1870s as well as the critical discourse that surrounded their production, and attempts to come to terms with what the artist thought he was doing in these pictures. I shall examine Pissarro's paintings of landscape in the light of writing about Impressionism as a "movement" (reviews of the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, for instance) but shall read closely to see what critics thought was special, noteworthy, or strange about Pissarro as an individual painter. To say that each painter classified as an Impressionist in 1874 painted in a unique fashion is to state what is now a truism. But to see Pissarro as a painter not exclusively invested in what has come to be known as an Impressionist aesthetic is to see him as un-Impressionist, or, more productively, to see our understanding of what we call Impressionism as oversimplified and incomplete. In writing about Pissarro and the distinctive nature of his pictorial enterprise, then, I am confronting the need to reconceptualize painting and its projects in the 1870s.

When critics began writing about Pissarro and his Impressionist colleagues in the first half of the 1870s, they described their work in terms that had little to do with those employed in criticism about painting in the previous decade.(7) Significantly, those critics, whether or not they liked the new painting or felt it had a future, agreed when describing its nature and aims.s In response to the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, Philippe Burty wrote that the group "pursues . . . a common artistic goal: in the process, the rendition of the broad light of open air, in the feeling, the purity of the first sensation."(9) Jules Castagnary praised what he saw as the instantaneous quality of the pictures on view:

These young artists have a way of comprehending nature that is neither tedious nor banal. It is vivacious, it is nimble, it is light; it is ravishing. Such rapid intelligence of the object and such pleasing facture! It is summary, true, but how accurate the indications are! ... [These artists] are "impressionists" in the sense that they render not the landscape but the sensation produced by the landscape.(10)