Lucien PISSARRO
1863–1944, France

Lucien Pissarro was born in Paris in 1863, the eldest son of Camille Pissarro and Julie Vellay.

In 1870 the family fled to London during the Franco-Prussian war, returning to Louveciennes in June 1871 and shortly after moving to Pontoise. It was here as a child that Lucien was in the constant company of his father’s peers – Cézanne, Manet and Monet in particular. In such surroundings, and nurtured by the constant encouragement, advice and instruction of his father, Lucien began to draw and paint.

Lucien was skilled as a painter in oils and watercolour, a wood engraver and a lithographer. In 1885, Camille and Lucien met Paul Signac and Georges Seurat, and their friendship with those artists was very influential. When Lucien participated with his father in the eighth Impressionist exhibition of 1886, their experiments with the Divisionism of Signac and Seurat were apparent.

A visit to England in 1883 marked the beginning of a long association with the country. On his return to France in the spring of 1884, his activities rapidly expanded and he became interested in the making of children’s books, studying the technique of wood engraving and learning the process of printing colour blocks. He moved to England permanently in 1890, married English girl, Esther Bensusan in 1892 and in 1894 by founded the Eragny Press in Hammersmith, which published limited editions of beautifully illustrated books. Several titles were published between 1894 and 1914, the first being ‘Queen of the Fishes’.

Lucien’s work is fascinating for its combination of two artistic traditions – the French and the English. As the son of Camille and a first hand witness of the Impressionist movement, he played a vital role in securing the acceptance of Impressionism in England. He was a founder member of the Camden Town Group, but when that was absorbed into the London Group he withdrew. From 1913-19, he recorded the English landscape of Dorset, Westmorland, Devon, Essex, Surrey and Sussex without theatrical or romantic overtones, and in 1916 he became a naturalised British subject.

In 1922 he made the first of many prolonged visits to the South of France and these visits continued until 1937, interspersed with seasons in Derbyshire, South Wales and Essex. To the end landscape remained his chosen means of expression, only rarely producing still-lifes, and the handful of portraits that he painted were all of his family.

Of all Camille’s children, Lucien was perhaps the closest to his father. After Lucien’s first visit to England, Camille initiated a long and almost daily correspondence with his son, and those letters constitute an important document in the history of Impressionism.

Source: http://www.pissarro.net