Denver Art Museum Celebrates Camille Pissarro’s Impressionist Vision in a Major Retrospective
More than 80 paintings from museums and private collections around the world unite at the Denver Art Museum to celebrate Pissarro’s profound influence on the Impressionist movement.
“The Honest Eye: Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism,” October 26-February 8, Denver Art Museum, 100 W. 14th Ave. Pkwy.; denverartmuseum.org | Photo: Courtesy Denver Art Museum
Cezanne praised him as “the first Impressionist.” Though a decade older and less vaunted than soon-to-be-household-name fellow artists such as Monet and Renoir, Camille Pissarro served as a mentor to the younger painters and a defining figure of the movement. Now, “The Honest Eye: Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism,” a co-venture of the Denver Art Museum and the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany, gives Pissarro his due with a first major museum retrospective in over 40 years, spanning four decades of his work through more than 80 paintings curated from nearly 50 international museums and private collections.
In opposition to his peers’ focus on upper-class subjects, Pissarro reveled in elevating the mundane, expertly capturing working-class life through plein-air moments of light and shade across the rural landscape. His illustrious oil-on-canvas “Hoar-Frost at Ennery (Gelée blanche à Ennery),” 1873, pictured, famously made its debut in 1874 at the then overtly anti-establishment Paris art show that gave Impressionism its name.
