Category: Neo-Impressionism

Peasant Girl Lighting a Fire. Frost, by Camille Pissarro

Peasant Girl Lighting a Fire. Frost by Camille Pissarro (1888)

My Daily Art Display’s featured painting today is entitled Peasant Girl Lighting a Fire. Frost, which was painted by Camille Pissarro in 1888 and can now be found in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.  At this time Pissarro was still a leading light of the Impressionist movement, a movement he had helped to form.   However it was two years prior to this work that Pissarro began to become interested in the experimental work of young artists, who had adopted the fragmented brushstroke technique which Georges Seurat and Paul Signac were trying out, known as pointillism , a technique Pissarro used in parts of this painting.  For a more in depth look at pointillism see My Daily Art Display October 21st 2011 for a painting by Georges Seurat and November 29th 2011 for a painting by Paul Signac. Pissarro had been introduced to Seurat and Signac in 1885 and in the following years he began to work in the pointillist style which had then been adopted by the Neo-Impressionists.  By the time Pissarro was in his sixties he found that this pointillism technique too restricting and in the last ten years of his life he returned to a purer Impressionist style.
Camille Pissarro was fifty-eight years of age when he completed today’s featured work of art.  Ten years earlier his style of painting was such that he would portray nature in his landscapes by a myriad of smaller comma-like brushstrokes built up on the surface of the canvas such as his 1877 work, The Red Roofs (see My Daily Art Display of November 30th 2010).  Pissarro was concerned that these works lacked clarity and so he decided to change the way he worked.  He spent time working in collaboration with Degas, who was, of all the Impressionists, a great believer and advocate of figure painting and the primacy of the human figure at the expense of landscape background.  It was maybe the views of Degas that led to Pissarro to complete some works in which the human being(s) took pride of place in the painting, as is the case with today’s featured work.

The painting depicts two peasant girls working in a field in a cold and frosty winter morning and we see one of them tending a fire.  Pissarro often painted peasant women at work.  Two fine examples of this are his 1881 work entitled Girl with a Stick and the 1893 painting entitled Woman with a Green Shawl.  His portrayal of peasants received some criticism for copying the ideas of Jean-François Millet but Pissarro firmly contested such a notion.  However in general art critics looked upon his works as true representations of peasant life.  Look at the beautiful way in which Pissarro has depicted the landscape.  At the time of this painting Pissarro was extremely interested in the pointillism technique of Seurat and Signac and he used this method to present us with a sumptuous backdrop to the two girls.  The painting has a light and airy feel to it and there is a subtle delicate nature to the work.  The work was painted in Eragny just north-west of Paris where Pissarro and his family lived for a time.

In the far distance we can see the low hills topped by irregular spaced bushy trees.  In the middle ground, we observe grazing cows in the meadow, a line of poplar trees at the foot of the hills and possibly a hidden stream running horizontally across the mid ground.   Notwithstanding the backdrop, the focus of the painting is on the two girls in the foreground, who almost appear to stand next to us.  The scene is lit up by the sun, somewhere out of sight, to the left, which throws off long blue shadows across the field.  It is a wintry sun and still low in the sky, hence the long shadow of the girl in the foreground, which disappears off the painting to the right.    Although it emits light, the sun gives off little warmth and so our two young workers are wrapped up well.  The temperature is even colder due to the wind chill factor.  Look how the girls skirt and the smoke from her small fire are blown horizontally by the wind which comes from the left of the painting.  One can imagine how cold it is with the driving wind on a wintry day. We almost shiver as we look at this work of art.

The girls are both well wrapped up against the morning’s wintry chill.  The girl on the right, who seems no more than a child, is warming her hands by the fire.  She wears a blue dress and a thick dark brown coat.  She has a dark woolen hat on her head which is pulled down to protect her ears from the icy wind.   The older girl, who is closest to us and because of her height, is the main focus of our attention.  She has taken a branch from the pile behind her, and is about to break it up and add it to the fire.  She wears a pink skirt with a blue apron.  She too has protected her head, wearing a white scarf tied beneath her chin.  Her final layer of protection is a pink and white shawl from which emerge long black sleeves of her dress.

The colour combinations Pissarro uses to achieve the colour we see is fascinating.  The girls pink dress is made up of a combination of yellow, blue and pink.  The green grass of the meadow is achieved by using a combination green, blue, yellow, pink and white.  The only orange Pissarro used was for the flames of the fire.

Pissarro fled the traumas of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and, like Monet, went to live in London.   It was whilst in London that he saw a number of paintings by Turner.  Pissarro later commented on Turner’s works and was amazed by the way Turner succeeded in conveying the snow’s whiteness, not just by the use of white alone but by combining a host of multi-coloured strokes, dabbed in, one against the other, which when looked at from a distance, created the desired effect.  It is in this painting that Pissarro has, without the actual presence of snow, managed to give us a crystalline frost of a cold winter’s morning encapsulated in an aura of diamond blue.

Madame Hector France (Portrait of H.F.) by Henri Edmond Cross

Madame Hector France (Portrait of H.F.) by Henri Edmond Cross (1891)

Today I want to look at the life of Delacroix and a couple of his paintings.  However I am not talking about Eugène Delacroix but the artist Henri-Edmond-Joseph Delacroix who was born in Douai a commune in the Nord département in Northern France, in 1856, some fifty-eight years after the great French Romantic painter.

Henri-Edmond-Joseph Delacroix was the only surviving child of a French father, Alcide Delacroix and a British mother, Fanny Woollett.  The family moved to Lille when Henri was nine years of age.  He showed an interest in drawing when he was young and his parents sent him to Carolus-Duran, the Lille painter, for private drawing and painting lessons when he was just ten years of age. He was encouraged as a youth to develop his artistic talent by his father’s widowed cousin, Dr Auguste Soins, who paid for much of Henri’s artistic training.   He spent a short time in Paris when he was nineteen, studying under the tutelage of the French realist painter, François Bonvin before returning to Lille.  In 1878 he enrolled on a three-year course at the Écoles Académiques de Dessin et d’Architecture in Lille and studied under the painter, Alphonse Colas.  Three years later he returned to Paris and studied in the atelier of Émile Dupont-Zipcy.

Henri began exhibiting his work in 1881 but so that he and his work would not be confused with the late romantic artist Henri-Eugène Delacroix he decided to change his name to “Henri Cross” which was a reduced English version of his surname (croix).  In 1886 he changed the signature on his paintings to Henri Edmond Cross so that there would be no confusion between him and the glass paste sculptor Henri Cros.  Henri Cross’ artwork changed in 1883 after travelling south to Provence and meeting up with Claude Monet.  His early works which had been mainly realist portraiture and still-life works had been predominately dark in colour but suddenly it all changed and his paintings took on the lighter colours and tones of the Impressionists.

The following year, 1884, was a milestone in French art.  Up until then any artist wanting to progress in their chosen career relied completely on having their works exhibited at the Paris Salon and for that to happen they had to submit their paintings to the Salon jurists to see if they considered their works good enough to be exhibited.  The jurists were, at this time, increasingly conservative in their views of what art was acceptable and were not receptive to the works proffered by the Impressionist artists whose works had moved away from the traditional academic style.  The Impressionists would often have their paintings rejected by the Salon jurists or if they did manage to have a paintings accepted it would be hung in such a way that it was almost hidden from view.  In 1863 the jurists rejected a surprisingly high percentage of paintings and this caused a furore amongst the “discarded” artists.

The following summer a number of these disgruntled artists, such as Seurat, Signac,  Albert Dubois-Pillet, Odilon Redon and today’s featured painter, Henri Cross, got together and formed the Société des Artistes Indépendants (Society of Independent Artists) and based the society on the premise sans jury ni récompense, (No jury nor awards).  They held their own inaugural exhibition, Salon des Indépendants, in May 1884 and Henri Cross exhibited some of his paintings.  In 1888 he visits the Cote d’Azur for the first time and paints in Eze and Nice and it is in this year that he meets Irma Clare, the subject of today’s paintings.  In 1891 he became Vice-President of the Society.  He had by this time become one of the leading figures of the Neo-Impressionism movement.

Henri Cross’ health was poor and he suffered badly from rheumatism.  He decided to move to the warmer climes of the South of France.   He initially settled in a rented house in Cabasson, near Le Lavandou, but later went to live in Saint-Clair, a small hamlet just outside of St Tropez, where he stayed for the rest of his life, except for his two visits to Italy, when he journeyed to Tuscany and Umbria in 1903 and 1908 and his trips to Paris to the annual Salon des Indépendants.  Paul Signac followed him south the next year and settled in St Tropez.  It was during this period that Cross was introduced to the revolutionary artist, Henri Matisse.  Henri Cross’ close working relationship with Paul Signac, led to him being introduced to the artistic technique, known as pointillism.  Pointillism is the methodical and scientific technique which juxtaposed small dots of pure colour together to maximize luminosity. The dots appear to intermingle and blend in the observer’s eye.

My Daily Art Display featured painting today was completed by Henri Cross in 1891 and is housed in the Musée d’Orsay.  It is entitled Madame Hector France (Portrait of H.F.) and is a fine example of the artist’s use of the pointillism technique with its screen of small regular dots over a densely painted ground.   Henri Cross exhibited the work at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Indépendants in 1891 and was looked upon as his first major work which adopted the Neo-Impressionist style.

The subject of this impressive portrait is Irma Clare the wife of Hector France, a novelist who was best known for his 1886 French language collection of tales about European adventurers and veiled temptresses, under the marvellous title Musk, Hashish and Blood.  Irma appears to be on a terrace, having just escaped from a dazzling soiree which is the source of light emanating from the right.  This is almost a life-size portrait of the lady and the light of the summer’s night is suggested through the sparkling glow of the lamps which hang from the tree branches in the background.  It is a conventional society portrait.  Irma is adorned with the most sumptuous and elegant gown.  Wearing this full length gown she almost gives us the impression that she is gliding elegantly across the painting.  Her hair sparkles and its colouring almost merges with the night air which surrounds her

In the foreground we have a mottled pink and white rhododendron which, along with the way the artist has depicted the chair at an angle and the receding floor tiles, gives the painting added depth.  As we have seen in paintings I have featured by Monet and other Impressionists, the Japanese influence had taken hold in late nineteenth century France and it is more than likely that the floral display we see in this painting comes from the influence of Japanese prints which were all the rage in France as does the frieze of white Japanese fans we see in the middle-ground.

In May 1893, two years after the painting was exhibited, Mrs Hector France became Mrs Henri Edmond Cross, the wife of the artist.  For some people the coupling of the two was a coupling of opposites.  He was looked upon as a secretive man who was always serious whereas Irma was seen as more frivolous, high-spirited and somewhat shallow.  They lived in Saint-Clair and one of their neighbours was the Belgian Neo-Impressionist painter, Théo van Rysselberghe and his wife Maria.  She was unequivocally critical of Irma.  In the biography Henri-Edmond Cross: études et l’oeuvres sur papier by Françoise Baligand, Raphaël Dupouy, and Claire Maingon, she is quoted as describing Irma as “petty, base of nature and an idle gourmand”.  This was not the universal opinion of her as others such as the French artist and friend of the couple, Charles Angrand, found Irma very hospitable and during the latter part of Henri Cross’ life, a very caring person as far as her husband was concerned.

Portrait of Madame Cross by Henri Edmond Cross (1901)

Once settled and living around St Tropez, Henri Cross turned more and more to landscape painting using vivid colours but he would still complete the occasional portrait of his beloved wife as was the case in 1901 when he completed the work entitled Portrait of Madame Cross, seated in the garden, looking slightly older, bedecked in a large hat and a floral gown.  This painting is also housed at the Musée d’Orsay.

By 1907 Henri Cross’ health deteriorated.  His eyesight was being affected by the eye disease iritis and his arthritis was becoming more debilitating.  In 1909 whilst visiting Paris he was diagnosed as suffering from terminal cancer.  He returned home to Saint-Clair and died in May 1910 aged 54.  Henri Cross is buried in Le Lavandou.

The Dining Room by Paul Signac

The Dining Room by Paul Signac (c.1887)

On October 21st,  I looked at a work by the Neo-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat, which had been completed by him using the technique known as Pointillism or Divisionism.   For a brief explanation of those terms, please go and look at that earlier blog.  Today I want to look at a work by his contemporary and friend Paul Signac.

Paul Victor Jules Signac was born in Paris in 1863 and came from a prosperous family of shopkeepers.  Originally he trained to become an architect but at the age of eighteen, after visiting a Claude Monet Exhibition, he decided to set off on an artistic career and learn the technique of en plein air painting.  His earliest known works were landscapes or still-lifes and one can see in them an Impressionist influence, especially the works of Monet and Alfred Sisley.  At the age of twenty he was tutored by the Prix de Rome winner Emile-Jean-Baptiste Bin.  In 1884 he became a founder member of the Société des Artistes Indépendants and their Salon des Indépendants.   The Salon des Indépendants was an annual exhibition which started in 1884 and was held in Paris by the Société des Artistes Indépendants.  It was set up in direct competition to the Paris Salon.   Many artists as well as the public became increasingly unhappy with the rigid and exclusive jurist-based selection policies of the official Salon.  Just over twenty years earlier, in 1863 the first Salon des Refusés had been held for innovative artists whose works had been rejected by the official Salon.  The Société des Artistes Indépendants which Signac co-founded had the motto “Sans jury ni récompense” which meant “no jury, no awards”.  One of the other co-founders of this society was Georges Seurat and it was he who introduced the principles of Divisionism and the theory of colours to his friend Signac.

Signac, up until then, had been following the Impressionist style of painting but he became fascinated with Seurat’s technique, known as Pointillism.    He then decided to experiment with this newly acquired technique of scientifically juxtaposing small dots of pure color on the canvas which combined and blended them in the viewer’s eye instead of the artist blending the colours on a palette before putting the combination on to the canvas.  Signac was fascinated with this technique and was tireless in his attempts to convert others to Seurat’s methods. In 1885 Signac met Camille Pissarro, whom he introduced to Seurat. Pissarro realised that this technique was the answer to his desire to have a rational style and so adopted it with great fervour.  Pissarro, against the wishes of the other Impressionists, invited Signac to participate in their eighth and last Impressionist Exhibition in 1886.

Signac loved to sail and a large number of his paintings featured the French coast and its harbours.  He would progressively sail further afield, visiting various ports in the Mediterranean as well as the Dutch coast to the north.  During the summers he would head south to the Côte d’Azur and St Tropez where he had bought himself a house in 1892.  He would always return from his voyages with numerous sketches of the places he had visited and then back in his studio, turn them into beautifully coloured canvases that are carefully worked out in small, mosaic-like squares of colour, and which were quite different from the tiny, variegated dots previously used by Seurat.

He became friends with Vincent van Gogh and the two would spend time in Van Gogh’s Parisian home and his summer hide-away in Arles. From the mid-1880s Signac exhibited regularly. Apart from the Salon des Indépendants, in which he figured every year, he showed at the last Impressionist Exhibition (1886) at the invitation of Pissarro.   It was not until he was almost forty years of age that he had his first one-man exhibition which was held at the Paris gallery owned by Siegfried Bing.  However like his Neo-Impressionist friends he received little public acclaim for the first 20 years of his career.  On Seurat’s death in 1891, Paul Signac became the leader of the Neo-Impressionists

Signac was a great inspiration to the young and up-and-coming painters such as Henri Matisse and André Derian.  It was his support that played a vital role in the evolution of Fauvism.   Fauvism was the short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasised the artistic qualities of strong colour more than the representational or realistic values of the Impressionist painters.  Signac became president of the annual Salon des Independants in 1908 and retained that position until his death.   As such, Signac encouraged and supported younger artists such as Matisse by allowing their works and the controversial works of the Fauves and the Cubists to be exhibited.

Signac died in Paris in 1935, aged seventy-two.

My Daily Art Display featured oil on white primed canvas painting today is not one of Signac’s landscape or seascape although it does highlight the unusual Divisionism technique.  It is entitled Dining Room and was completed in 1887 and exhibited at the Paris Salon des Indépendants in 1887 that year.  It now hangs in the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, in Otterlo, Netherlands.  Before us we see three people, a man and a woman seated at a table and a maidservant.  Although the setting looks like it has all the accoutrements of a well-to-do bourgeois household, the dining room is actually that of Signac’s family, and before us we have Signac’s mother, grandfather and housekeeper.   The room is lit from behind with light emanating from a window on the rear wall.  This illuminates the subjects vividly and creates silhouettes and strong contrasts of light and shade.  It gives a strong structure to the composition.  See how Signac has highlighted areas of the painting by the use of barely tinted yellowish whites.  The seated characters are rather wooden-like.  They sit at the lunch table in stony silence.  There appears to be no communication between Signac’s grandfather and mother and the setting is devoid of anecdote.  There is a stiffness of what we see before us.  There is a frozen solemnity about the scene and this may have been Signac’s way of pictorially criticising the strict and ritualistic sombreness of middle-class meal times.

I am not sure I like the Divisionism technique used in Signac’s indoor scenes.  I think it works much better in his coastal landscape works.  There is no doubt about it that it was a clever technique but it is just not for me.