[Illustration: _By permission of M. Durand-Ruel._
The merit of _Camille Pissarro_ is to have once more set the painting of peasants, weakened by Breton, upon the virile lines of Millet, and to have supplemented them in those places where Millet was technically inadequate. When the Impressionist movement began Camille Pissarro had already a past: he was the recognised landscape painter of the Norman plains; the straightforward observer of peasants, the plain and simple painter of the vegetable gardens stretching round peasant dwellings. Since Millet, no artist had placed himself in closer relationship to the life of the earth and of cultivated nature. Though a delicate analyst, Pissarro had not the epic feeling nor the religious mysticism of Millet; but like Millet he was a rustic in spirit, like him a Norman, from the land of vineyards, of large farmyards, green meadows, soft avenues of poplars, and wide horizons reddened by the sun. He was healthy, tender, and intimate in feeling, rejoiced in the richness of the land and the voluptuous undulation of fields, and he could give a striking impression of a region in its work-a-day character. Celebrated in the press as the legitimate descendant of Millet, he might have contented himself with his regular successes. He had, indeed, arrived at an age when men usually leave off making experiments, and reap what they have sown in their youth, at an age when many conquerors occupy themselves with the mechanical reproduction of their own works. Nevertheless the Impressionistic movement became for Pissarro the starting-point of a new way.
[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET. _The Century._]
[Illustration: MONET'S HOME AT GIVERNY. _The Century._]
He aimed at fresher, intenser, and more transparent light, at a more cogent observation of phenomena, at a more exact analysis of the encompassing atmosphere. He celebrated the eternal, immutable light in which the world is bathed. He loved it specially during clear afternoons, when it plays over bright green meadows fringed by soft trees, or at the foot of low hills. He has sought it on the slopes across which it ripples deliciously, on the plains from which it rises like a light veil of gauze. He studied the play of light upon the bronzed skin of labourers, on the coats of animals, on the foliage and fruit of trees. He characterised the seasons, the hour of day, the moment, with the conscientiousness of a peasant intent upon noting the direction of the wind and the position of the sun. The cold, chilly humour of autumn afternoons, the vivid clarity of sparkling wintry skies, the bloom and lightness of spring mornings, the oppressive brooding of summer, the luxuriance or the aridity of the earth, the young vigour of foliage or the fading of nature robbed of her adornment,--all these Pissarro has painted with largeness, plainness, and simplicity. He strays over the fields, watching the shepherd driving out his flock, the wains rumbling along the uneven roads, the quiet, rhythmical movement of the gleaners, the graceful gait of the women who have been reaping and now return home in the evening with a rake across their shoulders; he stations himself at the entrance of villages where the apple-pickers are at work, and the women minding geese stand by their drove; he notes the whole life of peasants, and gives truer and more direct intelligence of it than Millet did in his broad, synthetic manner. Where there is a classic quietude and an oily heaviness in Millet, there is in Pissarro palpitating life, transparence, and freshness. He sees the country in bright, laughing tones; and the pure white of the kerchiefs, the pale rose-colour or tender blue bodices of his peasant women, lend his pictures a blithe delicacy of colour. His girls are like fresh flowers of the field which the sun of June brings forth upon the meadows. There is something intense and yet soft, strong and delicate, true and rhythmical in Pissarro's tender poems of country life.