Pissarro - Seated Woman with Goats - (1885)

The Radical Discipline of the Dot

By 1885, Camille Pissarro was the elder statesman of Impressionism. He was the only artist to show in all eight of the group’s exhibitions. Most men his age would have coasted on their hard-won reputation. Instead, Pissarro blew up his career.

He met a young rebel named Georges Seurat and became obsessed with the science of the eye. He abandoned the loose, atmospheric brushwork that the public finally liked. He replaced it with the rigid, agonizing discipline of Pointillism. Seated Woman with Goats is the evidence of that defection.

This wasn't a quick sketch in a field. It was a months-long labor of microscopic precision. Pissarro sat in his studio and applied tiny dots of pigment based on the color theories of Michel Eugène Chevreul. He wanted the light to vibrate on the canvas rather than mix on the palette.

The market hated it. The kingmakers and collectors who were finally opening their wallets slammed them shut again. They wanted pretty, breezy pictures. Pissarro gave them a peasant woman rendered with the cold logic of a laboratory.

He was nearly broke and living in a countryside that smelled of manure and dry hay. Radical anarchist leaflets were moving through the backrooms of Paris, and Pissarro’s refusal to paint for the "bourgeois" market was its own form of political riot. He didn't care about being popular. He cared about the truth of the light and the dignity of the laborer.

References

• Brettell, Richard R. Pissarro and Pontoise: The Painter in a Landscape. Yale University Press, 1990.
• Chevreul, Michel Eugène. The Laws of Contrast of Colour. Routledge, 1861.
• Rewald, John. The History of Impressionism. Museum of Modern Art, 1973.
• Ward, Martha. Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde. University of Chicago Press, 1996.