Camille Pissarro ( French, 1830 - 1903 )
Camille Pissarro believed fervently in the benefits of manual labor and communal living and represented laboring peasants throughout his life. In spite of this traditional subject, he was one of the more daring members of the Impressionist group. He was constantly experimenting with cutting-edge techniques and scientific theories to record his observations of nature while imbuing his work with compositional stability and meaning. Pissarro was among the first to adopt Georges Seurat’s groundbreaking pointillist method, in which tiny dots of pure color were placed side by side in order to re-create the dazzling effect of reflected light. Here, dots of red, blue, green, pink, lavender, orange, and yellow create a stylized and carefully balanced scene of apple picking in the French countryside in the bright afternoon sun.
Nicole Myers, DMA label copy, 2017.