Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) said that before him “no Jew in [France] has produced art.”  In Anka Muhlstein _Camille Pissarro: The Audacity of Impressionism_ (translated from French by

Adriana Hunter, Other Press, 308p, $30), however, the emphasis on Pissarro’s religious and ethnic background is misleading.  He was a non-believer—she calls him both agnostic and atheist. He

didn’t attend Hebrew school, have a Bar Mitzvah or know about Yom Kippur, and never took part in religious ceremonies. Though Pissarro was a rarity in his time, in the early 20th century

many foreign-born Jewish painters came to Paris: Modigliani from Italy; Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine, Jules Pascin and Moise Kisling from Eastern Europe.  Lucian Freud, born in Berlin, was

French, English and Spanish, with some knowledge of Danish, he went back to Paris in 1855.  He had no formal art training, preferred to paint in northern Normandy rather than in the South of

France, and never returned to the tropics. Hay Harvest at Éragny, 1901. Pissarro struggled with severe hardships throughout his life.  His mother, living in Paris, was sick, neurotic,

demanding and oppressive—right up there with the monster moms of Ivan Turgenev and Robert Lowell.  She refused to allow her son to marry the mother of his children, her former servant. 

Julie Vellay had humble origins, was poor, Catholic and barely literate, but Pissarro loved her.  Unable to support himself as an artist and dependent on his mother for economic survival, he

lacked the courage to oppose her.  As the frustrated historian Edward Gibbon wrote, “I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.”  Pissarro and Julie secretly married in London, but his mother

continued to treat her as a servant and even whacked her with a cane. Camille Pissarro and his wife, Julie Vellay, 1877 Pissarro was a devoted father and encouraged his children’s artistic

talents.  Despite his extreme poverty, he had eight offspring between 1863 and 1884, and had to deal with raising infants and the problems of adult children at the same time.  Three children

died, including his favourite, Minette, at the age of nine.  He tenderly portrayed her, aged seven in 1872, standing up and facing the viewer, with pink face and full lips.   She clasps her

hands on her waist, and wears a bow on her long brown hair, a white scarf, blue smock over a red-pattern dress, grey and red stockings.  The side table—with a white bottle, Chinese box and

teapot—looks as if it’s unbalanced, with three legs on one side and the fourth behind Minette. Camille Pissarro: Portrait of Jeanne Pissarro, Called Minette The painter’s struggles continued

in 1871 when his house in Louveciennes, fifteen miles west of Paris, was looted and destroyed during the Franco-Prussian War.  As many as 1,500 works of art from twenty years of his life

had vanished.  When he returned to the village to survey the damage he noticed that several local women were wearing aprons made from his cut-up, and sometimes signed, canvases.  He

overvalued his loss at 50,000 francs but was insultingly compensated with only 835 francs. He suffered harsh criticism, lack of recognition and forty years of poverty until he was in his

sixties.  One critic savagely described his art as “just a palette knife that’s been scraped uniformly over a dirty canvas,” and he felt crushed by the unremitting contempt.  He lived wall

to mouth and lamented that even one sale “would be a great relief because difficulties, or rather destitution have hit my household and threaten the family at every moment”. He was almost

forced to give up painting, but pulled himself together and remained resolute: “What I’ve had to suffer is inconceivable, of course, but I have lived and even though I am convinced that I

have no future I think that, if I had to start all over again, I wouldn’t hesitate to tread the same path.” Le grand noyer à l’Hermitage, 1875. The manner of painting was described as

incomplete and sketchy. Muhlstein is good on the virulent anti-Semitic atmosphere which Pissarro endured when a Jewish officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was accused of passing military

secrets to the Germans.  Found guilty of treason and court martialed in 1894, Dreyfus was sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana.   After the

evidence that condemned him was revealed to be false, he was released but—to appease the raging mobs—was sentenced to ten more years in prison.  He always maintained his innocence but was

broken by his cruel detention in the tropics, accepted a pardon and was not fully exonerated until 1906.  (Muhlstein’s husband, Louis Begley, published a perceptive book on Dreyfus in 2010.)

Alfred Dreyfus circa 1894 The Dreyfus affair tore apart the Impressionists.  Pissarro, Monet, Mary Cassatt and Paul Signac supported Dreyfus; Degas, Renoir, Cézanne and Jean-Louis Forain

condemned him.  Muhlstein writes that “Degas lashed out at Pissarro and pronounced his paintings idiotic.”  When a friend pointed out that he had recently found “Pissarro’s paintings ‘very

good,’ Degas retorted, ‘Yes, but that was before the Dreyfus affair.’ ”  Yet Pissarro and Degas were the only artists to appear in all eight original Impressionist exhibitions. Danish

citizenship exempted Pissarro from military service, and fear of deportation kept him out of political battles.  But he remained committed to anarchist principles: mistrust of government,

opposition to the church and the army, passion for social justice.  In 1889 he made 28 pen-and-ink drawings, _Social Turpitude,_ about oppression by the rich and the hardships of the poor.

Pissarro’s strong character enabled him to survive.  He was a decade older than the other Impressionists, and his long prematurely white beard and large family made him seem patriarchal. 

The cantankerous and hot-headed Cézanne said “he was a father to me.  He was someone you could consult and something like the good Lord.”  Pissarro was admirably serene and resigned, amiable

and benevolent.  His wife Julie, a wise choice, was efficient and generous, courageous and stoical.  Like her husband, she was resolute in adversity, and he always remained faithful to her.

Camille Pissarro, Portrait of Paul Cézanne, 1874 Tubes of portable paint and the new railways enabled the Impressionists to work outdoors and travel more rapidly to Paris and to new

locales.  They split on plein-air painting, as they had done on Dreyfus.  Pissarro, Monet and Renoir left the traditional studio; Manet, Degas and Forain remained inside.  But the group,

despite divisions, remained loyal and held together. Camille Pissarro: A View of L’Hermitage, near Pontoise 1874 Pissarro was interested in harmonies, not faces, in “establishing the

connection between sky, terrain, water” and the distant half-hidden human figures.  But his four self-portraits were major works.  In 1873 his bald dome was lit, face shadowed, eyebrows

thick, dark eyes deep in the sockets, untrimmed beard hanging down to his chest, mouth hidden but expression grave and somber.  He tried for a time to imitate Georges Seurat’s

_pointillisme_—juxtaposed dots of color rather than a mixed palette—but couldn’t surpass his usual style and soon abandoned it.  In his sixties he still got up at five in the morning, worked

till noon and again from two to five, and sometimes completed a picture in one day.  Imitating Monet’s series of poplars, haystacks and Rouen cathedral, in the 1890s Pissarro painted a

series of Parisian views at different times of the day and on several simultaneous canvases. Camille Pissarro – Self-portrait 2 The New York literati have loyally provided fulsome blurbs

printed inside the pages of the book.  But a closer look reveals that Muhlstein’s _Pissarro_ is not, as they claim, scholarly, sparkling, incisive, insightful and irresistible.  She has not

used archival material, has not included a bibliography and index, and has reproduced only five pictures.  Her book is a pleasant but familiar introduction, with no incisive analyses of his

paintings and no new information. Her style is poor.  She relies on clichés: a question “reared its head,” “scattered far and wide,” “few and far between.”  She repeats “it goes without

saying” three times and then says it.  She drags the reader back into the story by stating “I described in an earlier chapter,” “but let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” “but let’s return to

the 1880s.”  She offers tedious lists of museums and cities.  She describes places and prospects superficially: his subjects “were many and varied”, Caracas was “characterized by perpetual

motion”, in “Berthe Morisot’s living room there were endless comings and goings,” “the next two years would prove exciting.”  She incorrectly calls an old cemetery “disaffected”.  (The

translator can’t be blamed since Muhlstein lives in New York and is bilingual.)  The trains did not make “the distances shorter”.  The distances remained the same but the places took less

time to reach.  Despite his assertions, Monet did not leave “Gleyre’s studio after only a few weeks,” but remained there for seventeen months.  The Franco-Prussian War could not “easily have

been avoided.”  Bismarck provoked the war and his victory led to German unification. Just as Dostoyevsky is often quoted as saying, “We all come out of Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,” so Cézanne

speculated, “We may all come from Pissarro.  Yes, he was the first Impressionist.”  But this does not make him—as Muhlstein claims—the best.  His paintings are not difficult to understand. 

Limited by his emphasis on landscape rather than on people and less technically brilliant than Monet, his art clearly stands below that of Monet, Degas, Renoir and his admirer Cézanne.

_Jeffrey Meyers, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has published five books on art: Painting and the Novel, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis, Impressionist Quartet,

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