Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1910 edition. Excerpt: ...congenial to him. Rouen, a town for which he had a kind of predilection, suggested to him a number of subjects for his etchings. The etchings of Rouen, twenty-four in all, depict the ancient streets in all their decay; they convey a sense of forlorn solitude--they may even be said to suggest the sensation of dampness and mould. But the principal part of his engraved work is devoted to rural life. In his etchings the labourers in the fields are rendered with the same sincerity as in his oil-paintings and his body-colour drawings. There they stand, with their bodies deformed by toil, in the painful attitudes which prolonged strain has enforced upon them, yet somehow giving the suggestion of labour honestly and cheerfully accomplished. Two large blocks are to be noted for their power and for the feeling of movement which they impart to a crowd: Le Marche de la volatlle, and Le Marche aux legumes a Pontoise, executed in 1891. Pissarro could when he chose portray other types than that of the peasant; his Portrait de Cezanne in 1874 is full of life, and admirably renders his air of solitude and introspection. He also engraved his own portrait; he portrayed himself just as he was, without any added dignity--an old man in spectacles, with a long beard, full of years, older in appearance than he was in reality. He also practised lithography, making some early essays about 1874, but not taking it up seriously until 1896; the forty examples which he produced after that date constitute practically the whole of his work in this branch of engraving. The subjects are similar to those of his etchings--views of Rouen, Paris, and rural subjects. In his lithographic work he displayed the same aptitude for experimenting in different methods, which is to be...