How Camille Pissarro Went from Mediocrity to Magnificence

Among the big thinkers, the most invisible of the Impressionists is the father figure of the group, Camille Pissarro. An artist of impeccable character, he connected the group’s feuding factions, became an instructor and mentor to the impossible Cézanne, welcomed Georges Seurat and took up his pointillist cause, and even remained (until the Dreyfus Affair) on good terms with the irascible Degas. Pissarro thought hard, but he thought about the nature of visual experience more than about the progress of art history, observing that winter sun is actually warmer than the summer kind—an insight that moved Monet and Alfred Sisley, and illuminates their art.