Pissarro
“Humble and colossal”, as his friend Cézanne described him, Camille Pissarro (Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands, 1830–Paris, 1903) is perhaps the most important figure of impressionism and at the same time the least familiar of the movement’s members. As mentor to the group, it was he who in 1873 drafted the statutes of the artists’ cooperative that launched the exhibitions of the impressionist group, and he was the only painter who participated in all eight of those shows, from 1874 to 1886. And yet, Pissarro’s career was eclipsed by the immense success of his friend Claude Monet. The first retrospective of the artist ever held in Spain focuses on Pissarro’s urban and rural landscapes, the genre that overwhelmingly predominates in his oeuvre. The show presents seventy-nine oils organized chronologically, according to the places where the painter lived and which inspired his painting, such as Louveciennes, Pontoise, and Eragny.
