Anka Muhlstein

Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) occupied a central place in the art world of his time: a founding member of the new French school of painting, Impressionism, he attracted Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Degas, Berthe Morisot, and later Cézanne and Gauguin. Supported throughout his career, despite the hostility of the public, by the great Parisian art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, he had a persistent feeling of being apart, different, and difficult to classify. Settling in France at the age of twenty-five but born in the Danish West Indies, he was not French and, moreover, he was Jewish. He never hid this fact and knew that it was not insignificant in French society, which was shaken at the end of the 19th century by the defeat of 1870, workers' struggles, and the Dreyfus affair. His two passions were painting and the artistic education of his children. Thanks to his astonishing energy and availability, he never sacrificed one for the other, and his five sons became painters themselves. Drawing on Pissarro's considerable body of work and a vast collection of letters that reveal his warm nature and great freedom of thought, Anka Muhlstein paints a nuanced and intimate portrait of an artist with an independent and singular spirit.

Paperback | 272 pages
22.7 x 14.3 cm (8.9 x 5.6 in.) 
Publication Date: 2024

Only available in French.