Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) was a ceaseless innovator and organizer whose ideological concerns were as profound as his aesthetic interests. Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country examines how Pissarro’s artistic theories and social convictions influenced his Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist work.

            Pissarro espoused an anti-bourgeois, anarchist ideology and was interested in the plight of the working classes. This book’s authors examine recurring motifs in Pissarro’s work as intellectual metaphors as well as his background as a Sephardic Jew who was involved in many of the political and class issues of the period. The text also looks at Pissarro as a painter who identified with laborers and agriculture, exploring connections between his subject matter and the “dirty” nature of his painterly technique.

Featuring a wide selection of superb paintings from private collections, many rarely seen, this beautifully illustrated book reveals the genius of an artist keenly focused on his natural surroundings and the lives of common folk.