Camille Pissarro, from Mediocrity to Magnificence (century, painters, painting, make)

[Cida]

I somehow found this particularly interesting, as I'm not a Pissarro fan.

I like the way these article coax you into re-evaluating.




How Camille Pissarro Went from Mediocrity to Magnificence
He began as more of a tutor than a talent. But in his final decade he lent a keen eye-in-the-sky view to the Paris streets, rendering miracles of kinetic characterization.
Impressionism began in the eighteen-sixties under the auspices of two liberal institutions that had grown up in mid-century France, and that have continued to distinguish every art culture that descends from it: the open museum and the café. The Impressionists all met at the Louvre. The practice of open admission to the national collections had been established since the Revolution, and it wasn’t terribly difficult to get a “copyist card,” which allowed one into the Louvre with an easel to sketch the pictures. The budding independent painters sooner or later obtained a card—including Berthe Morisot, who was permitted to copy within the Grande Galerie when only a teen-ager. (The Impressionists welcomed women; Morisot and Mary Cassatt were more or less accepted as equals early on.)
Pissarro’s own painting from the eighteen-seventies can sometimes look undernourished, drained of even the most conventional pictorial drama. Yet his persistent sublimation of experience into sensation proved to be the catalyst for the most advanced leap any of the Impressionists would take. This occurred in his long and gentle mentoring of Paul Cézanne, in the seventies—the work of guiding and guarding that would make him “Father Abraham.”
Painted side by side, the telegraphic abbreviations of Pissarro and Cézanne become difficult to tell apart.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...in-book-review