The Impressionist and the City: Pissarros Series

About this book

Camille Pissarro is perhaps best known for the landscape paintings of his early career yet in the final decade of his life (1893-1903) he began to depict urban scenes and his paintings from this period of Paris Rouen and the busy ports of Dieppe and Le Havre formed an important component of his artistic output. At this time Pissarro like Monet started to work on canvases in series ofthen pointing several simultaneously and discarding one temporarily when the light the weather or his mood altered. He started all of them at the scene and worked with extraordinary speed and deftness. In this book the authors set Pissarros cityscapes in their broad art-historical context looking also at contemporary treatments of the urban scene by Vuillard Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec. Using Pissarros extensive correspondence from this period they reveal the artists own attitude towards his final works. The book includes a catatogue of Pissarros urban series each one introduced by an overview covering the history of the cityscape pictured and the production exhibition history and early critical reception of the series. This book is the catalogue for an exhibition of Pissarros cityscape paintings at the Dallas Museum of Art (November 15 1992 - January 31 1993). The exhibition will then be shown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from March 7 to June 6 1993 and at the Royal Academy in London from July 2 to October 10 1993.