Camille Pissarro (1830-1903)

Pissarro had five sons--Lucien, Georges, Félix, Ludovic-Rodo and Paul-Emile, all of whom became artists under the tutelage of their father. Richard Bretell observes of Pissarro as teacher and father: "he urged them to open themselves up to the world of art and art criticism. He organized their visits to museums and galleries. He involved himself in their moral and intellectual education. He introduced them to more artists of their generation than they could possibly have met on their own...Making art must have been as natural an activity in the Pissarro household as reading, eating or talking, and each of his sons took it up without the struggles for self-definition and without the professional traumas their father had experienced in his youth. Perhaps for that reason they each developed as the 'followers' of Pissarro in ways that their father never allowed Cézanne, Cassatt, Gauguin or Seurat to follow" (Camille Pissarro and His Descendants, exh. cat., Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, 2000, p. 25).

In the present work, Pissarro depicts his youngest son Paul-Emile who had been born roughly six years earlier in Eragny and began drawing at an early age. Camille encouraged and supported his son's desire to become an artist, and allowed him to accompany him on several painting trips to Le Havre, Dieppe and Rouen. Following Camille's death in 1903, Mme Pissarro urged Paulémile to abandon his artistic pursuits in order to learn more practical trades, but the young man returned to his painting just before the First World War. He went on to become an established Post-Impressionist artist, enjoying lasting rapport with his contemporaries Kees van Dongen, Maurice de Vlaminck, André Dunoyer de Segonzac and Raoul Dufy, with whom he toured the French countryside and painted outdoors, relying on techniques that he had first learned from his father many years before.