Pissarro - Hoarfrost (1873)

The Rebel in the Frost

Camille Pissarro did not paint winter to make a Christmas card. He painted it because he was tired of the lies told by the French Academy. While the state-sponsored Salon demanded polished myths and dead Roman heroes, Pissarro took his easel into the biting cold of the Oise valley. He stood in the mud until his wool coat stank of woodsmoke and damp.

Hoarfrost is a record of that physical struggle. Critics in 1874 hated it. They saw the thick, crusted paint and called it scrapings from a dirty palette. They were wrong. Pissarro was using a palette knife to mimic the heavy, frozen texture of the soil itself. He was building a world out of pigment.

Look at the shadows. You will not find a drop of black paint in them. Pissarro famously banned black from his kit because nature does not use it. Instead, he found the truth in deep blues and jarring violets. These colors captured the metallic tang of the winter air and the flicker of gaslight starting to glow in nearby cafes.

This painting was a declaration of war. By showing it at the first Impressionist exhibition, Pissarro helped trigger a breakaway from the state-sponsored art machine. He and his band of rebels were staging a coup against the Academy. They knew the camera was already stealing the job of capturing reality. They decided to capture the feeling of being alive instead.

References

• Berson, Ruth. The Impressionist Exhibitions in Figures and Documents. University of Chicago Press, 1996.
• Pissarro, Joachim. Camille Pissarro. New York: Rizzoli International, 1993.
• Rewald, John. The History of Impressionism. Museum of Modern Art, 1973.
• Shiff, Richard. Cézanne and the End of Impressionism. University of Chicago Press, 1984.