Camille Pissarro Etching

Camille Pissarro was one of the most influential members of the French Impressionist movement and the only artist to participate in all eight Impressionist exhibitions.

Born in July of 1830 on the island of Saint Thomas in the Danish West Indies, Camille was the son of Frédéric and Rachel Pissarro. At the age of 12, he went to school in Paris, where he displayed a penchant for drawing. He returned again to Paris in 1855, having convinced his parents to allow him to pursue a career as an artist rather than work in the family import/export business. Camille studied at the Académie Suisse alongside Claude Monet, and, during this time, he met Paul Cézanne, Édouard Manet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

In 1869, Camille settled in Louveciennes. The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 prompted him to move to England, and, with Monet, Camille painted a series of landscapes around Norwood and Crystal Palace, while studying English landscape painting in the museums. Upon returning a year later at the end of the War to Louveciennes, Camille discovered that only 40 of his 1,500 paintings — almost 20 years’ work — remained undamaged.

Camille settled in Pontoise in the summer of 1871, remaining there and gathering a close circle of friends around him for the next 10 years. He reestablished relationships with Cézanne, Manet, Monet, Renoir and Edgar Degas, expressing his desire to create an alternative to the Salon, so that their group could display their own unique styles. Camille married Julie Vellay, with whom he would have seven children. Cézanne repeatedly came to stay with them, and, under Camille’s influence, he learned to study nature more patiently, even copying one of Camille’s landscapes in order to learn his teacher’s technique.

The first Impressionist group exhibition, initiated by Monet in 1874, earned the Impressionists much criticism for their art. While mainly interested in landscape, Camille introduced people — generally, peasants going about their rural occupations — and animals into his works, and they often became the focal point of the composition. It was this unsentimental and realistic approach, with the complete absence of any pretense, which seemed to stop his work from finding appreciation in the general public.

One of the few collectors who did show interest in Camille’s work was a bank employee named Paul Gauguin, who, after acquiring a small collection of Impressionist works, turned to Camille for advice on becoming a painter himself. For several years, Gauguin closely followed his mentor, and, although their friendship was fraught with disagreement and misunderstandings, Gauguin still wrote shortly before Camille’s death in 1906: “He was one of my masters, and I do not deny him.”

In the 1880s, Camille moved from Pontoise to nearby Osny, before Eragny, a small village much further from Paris. At a time when he was dissatisfied with his work, in 1885, Camille met both Paul Signac and Georges Seurat. He was fascinated by their efforts to replace the intuitive perceptive approach of the Impressionists with a “Divisionist” method, or scientific study of nature’s phenomena based on optical laws. Despite having reached his mid-50s, Camille did not hesitate to follow the two young innovators. The following year, he passed on this new concept to Vincent Van Gogh, who had just arrived in Paris and was keen to learn of the most recent developments in art. However, after a few years, Camille felt restricted by Seurat’s theories and returned to his more spontaneous technique while retaining the lightness and purity of color acquired during his Divisionist phase.

In the last years of his life, Camille divided his time between Paris, Rouen, Le Havre and Eragny, painting several series of different aspects of these cities, with varying light and weather effects. Many of these paintings are considered among his best and make for an apt finale to his long and prodigious career.

When Camille Pissarro died in the autumn of 1903, he had finally started to gain public recognition. Today his work can be found in many of the most important museums and collections throughout the world.

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(Biography provided by Stern Pissarro Gallery)

Emerging in 19th-century France, Impressionist art embraced loose brushwork and plein-air painting to respond to the movement of daily life. Although the pioneers of the Impressionist movement — Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir — are now household names, their work was a radical break with an art scene led and shaped by academic traditions for around two centuries. These academies had oversight of a curriculum that emphasized formal drawing, painting and sculpting techniques and historical themes.

The French Impressionists were influenced by a group of artists known as the Barbizon School, who painted what they witnessed in nature. The rejection of pieces by these artists and the later Impressionists from the salons culminated in a watershed 1874 exhibition in Paris that was staged outside of the juried systems. After a work of Monet’s was derided by a critic as an unfinished “impression,” the term was taken as a celebration of their shared interest in capturing fleeting moments as subject matter, whether the shifting weather on rural landscapes or the frenzy of an urban crowd. Rather than the exacting realism of the academic tradition, Impressionist paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings represented how an artist saw a world in motion.

Many Impressionist painters were inspired by the perspectives in imported Japanese prints alongside these shifts in European painting — Édouard Manet drew on ukiyo-e woodblock prints and depicted Japanese design in his Portrait of Émile Zola, for example. American artists such as Mary Cassatt and William Merritt Chase, who studied abroad, were impacted by the work of the French artists, and by the late 19th century American Impressionism had its own distinct aesthetics with painters responding to the rapid modernization of cities through quickly created works that were vivid with color and light.

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Decorating with fine art prints — whether they’re figurative prints, abstract prints or another variety — has always been a practical way of bringing a space to life as well as bringing works by an artist you love into your home.

Pursued in the 1960s and ’70s, largely by Pop artists drawn to its associations with mass production, advertising, packaging and seriality, as well as those challenging the primacy of the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke, printmaking was embraced in the 1980s by painters and conceptual artists ranging from David Salle and Elizabeth Murray to Adrian Piper and Sherrie Levine.

Printmaking is the transfer of an image from one surface to another. An artist takes a material like stone, metal, wood or wax, carves, incises, draws or otherwise marks it with an image, inks or paints it and then transfers the image to a piece of paper or other material.

Fine art prints are frequently confused with their more commercial counterparts. After all, our closest connection to the printed image is through mass-produced newspapers, magazines and books, and many people don’t realize that even though prints are editions, they start with an original image created by an artist with the intent of reproducing it in a small batch. Fine art prints are created in strictly limited editions — 20 or 30 or maybe 50 — and are always based on an image created specifically to be made into an edition.

Many people think of revered Dutch artist Rembrandt as a painter but may not know that he was a printmaker as well. His prints have been preserved in time along with the work of other celebrated printmakers such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. These fine art prints are still highly sought after by collectors.

“It’s another tool in the artist’s toolbox, just like painting or sculpture or anything else that an artist uses in the service of mark making or expressing him- or herself,” says International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) vice president Betsy Senior, of New York’s Betsy Senior Fine Art, Inc.

Because artist’s editions tend to be more affordable and available than his or her unique works, they’re more accessible and can be a great opportunity to bring a variety of colors, textures and shapes into a space.

For tight corners, select small fine art prints as opposed to the oversized bold piece you’ll hang as a focal point in the dining area. But be careful not to choose something that is too big for your space. And feel free to lean into it if need be — not every work needs picture-hanging hooks. Leaning a larger fine art print against the wall behind a bookcase can add a stylish installation-type dynamic to your living room. (Read more about how to arrange wall art here.)

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