Artist Camille Pissarro was key to the Impressionist movement, but often over-shadowed by his more famous friends. Anthea Gerrie tours a new exhibition of his work with his great-grand-daughter to learn more about his artistic and Jewish legacy

It’s a family affair,” explains Lélia Pissarro, wiping away a tear of emotion as she tours a new exhibition of her great-grandfather Camille’s work, which she says is “the most engaging I’ve ever seen — and I’ve seen plenty all over the world. This is the first one which has brought me to tears.”

The blockbuster show is at the Ashmolean, the Oxford museum which holds the greatest collection of Pissarro works on paper. Pissarro was the Jewish artist considered not just the father of Impressionism but, by some, the grandfather of modern art. The show, the first in the UK devoted to the artist in 20 years, opens today in the city of dreaming spires. Lélia is here from her home in London to preview the hang and talk about the compulsion to make art which still grips the Pissarro family, but also a sense of Jewish identity which is perhaps stronger than the artist could ever have expected. Although he raged against anti-semitism he married a non-Jew and was not religious.

Lelia Pissarro with(l-r) great-grandmother Julie, grandfather Pual-Emile, great-grandfather Camille Pissarro and great-aunt Jeanne

Lelia Pissarro with(l-r) great-grandmother Julie, grandfather Pual-Emile, great-grandfather Camille Pissarro and great-aunt Jeanne (Photo: Anthea Gerrie)

“I didn’t even know I was Jewish till I was nine,” explains Lélia, an artist who sold her first canvas aged five. She was brought up by her grandparents till she was 11 and Paul-Emile, Camille’s prolific youngest son, the godson and pupil of Claude Monet, broke the news to her when explaining why she would not be able to take communion with her schoolmates in their Normandy village as she had hoped, “but I didn’t know what being Jewish meant, and we never spoke about it”.

The family avidly promote the work of her great-grandfather, work they feel is often overlooked. “A good Pissarro may fetch the same as a bad Monet because unlike his friends he didn’t paint people who looked like them,” explains Lélia's husband, the gallerist David Stern. “He painted peasants, farmers and working people. It was a political statement, yet he was at the cutting edge of art.” Curator Colin Harrison agrees: “He identified with the labourers rather than the financiers.”

Born in the Danish West Indies and reborn as an artist in Venezuela as a young man, Pissarro was hugely influential, a story spelled out in the Ashmolean show. After moving to Paris, he persuaded the unconventional artist friends who shared with him a love of painting outside, “en plein air”, to launch their own exhibition venue after being rejected by the Salon.

Village, Private Collection

Village, (Private Collection)

This conservative outfit, then a benchmark of artistic acceptability, was scandalised by a new generation of painters less interested in perspective than the effects of light, fog and, in the case of Pissarro in particular, the shimmering reflections thrown by rain and shadows on snow. It was one of the critics at their first exhibition who sneeringly dubbed them “the Impressionists”.

Pissarro painted haystacks before Monet, his depiction of trees and apples had a lasting influence on Cezanne and later, the theory of creating drama with dots of complementary colour which he adopted from his eldest son Lucien’s friends Seurat and Signac positively revolutionised the painting style of Van Gogh, whom Pissarro befriended during his two years in Paris. “Everything he did before then was so gloomy,” reflects Stern as we gaze on Van Gogh’s burst into colour with a bright, colourful painting of a restaurant in the pleasure resort of Asnières, another of the Ashmolean’s own holdings.

Apple Trees, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, (c) Jörg Mülle

Apple Trees, (Photo: Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, (c) Jörg Mülle)

Not for nothing did the art critic Waldemar Januszczak say in his recent BBC series: “Pissarro was the glue that held the Impressionists together.” He was not as beloved as Monet or Renoir, “but none of them would have got together and did what they did without him.”

Pissarro’s delve into dot painting may have opened doors for Van Gogh by giving him a new understanding of the power of complementary colours and short brush strokes, but it was disastrous for Pissarro, who spent most of his life struggling to support his large family. His dealer told him bluntly that his pointillist efforts, of which there is a charming example in the show of a view from his countryside window, were unsaleable, the effort of making them slowed down his output, and in 1890 he gave it up and reverted to watercolour and scenes of Paris life, finally finding the commercial success which had escaped him for so long.

The Pissarro family’s Jewish heritage is complicated. He married Julie, his parents’ non-Jewish servant, but his oldest son Lucien married a Jewish wife, as did his youngest, Paul-Emile. The latter divorced his wife when she was unable to give him children, and married a non-Jewish second wife, a union which, produced three children including Lélia’s father, Hugues-Claude, who also married a non-Jew. All embraced their Jewish identity — Paul-Emile was denounced and spent the Second World War in hiding — and Lélia became halachically Jewish after requesting her mother, Katia, convert to Judaism when she was 14, so she could have a Jewish mother and become batmitzvah.

Apple Picking, Dallas Museum of Art

Apple Picking, Dallas Museum of Art

Once back in Paris with her parents, Lelia had matzah packed into her Passover lunchbox and was identified by new Jewish schoolmates as a member of the tribe. “They swept me up and gave me a feeling of belonging I had never had before.” Thus, at 14, Lelia not only insisted on being sent to a Jewish school, she stayed on to teach art there. Later, she moved to Israel, where she met David Stern. They were married in an Orthodox ceremony in Israel, and her two brothers also married Jews . Lélia and David are members of synagogues in Kingston and Ealing where their three children were barmitzvah and batmitzvah.

Some of the most important exhibits in the Ashmolean show is the exquisite prints; Pissarro shared a passion for print-making with Edgar Degas, most famous for his paintings of dancers. The two collaborated closely on experimental techniques. But their long friendship came to an end in 1894 when the Dreyfus Affair led to an outburst of antisemitism in France and split the Impressionists. Pissarro and Monet were defenders of the army officer wrongly accused of treachery, Degas, Cezanne and Renoir were against him. Degas crossed the street to avoid Pissarro and did not even come to his funeral in 1903. Yet, his friendships with others remained close. Cezanne described him as “a father to me” and Monet, his close friend since their earliest days in Paris and a companion during their years living and painting in London, became guardian to Paul-Emile after Pissarro’s death.

Minette, Private Collection courtesy Ashmolean Museum

A portrait of Pissarro's daughter Minette who died young (Photo: Ashmolean Museum)

Undoubtedly the most affecting work in the show is the very last painting, a loan from the Tate of a self-portrait Camille Pissarro painted in 1903, his final year of life. Painted in haste as he contemplated his frailty as he turned 73, he wrote to his children: “I shall do my utmost to follow my destiny while working as hard as possible, because the thread that is keeping me here on earth is very near to unravelling completely.”

From his outsider beginnings thousands of miles from the centre of the 19th Century art world to his far-reaching influence on the greatest Impressionists, the sons he nurtured at their palettes and the artist grandchildren and great-grandchildren he would never know, Pissarro’s life sounds like the stuff of film. It’s no surprise a feature-length movie about his life and work will be released on 24th May, by the critically acclaimed art film outfit Exhibition on Screen.

Lélia’s story is a quieter but equally dramatic one. “Had it not been for the sons and grandsons in the Pissarro family who handed it down, I would not have the rich Jewish life I enjoy today,” she says. And her daughter Lyora carries the family’s artistic tradition into a fifth generation, living and working in New York.

Pissarro: Father of Impressionism runs at the Ashmolean Museum Oxford until June 12, Booking essential at ashmolean.org
pissarro.art for information about the artist and his family