Pissarro and Impressionism

In 1873, Paul Cézanne painted among the roads, fields and houses between Pontoise and Auvers-sur-Oise. Camille Pissarro was working nearby. Their contact was already years old, but painting side by side made a new kind of exchange possible: each artist could face the same outdoor conditions and see how the other turned light, land and buildings into a picture. Cézanne had come from a decade of often dark, heavily worked paintings. The landscapes of this period brought brighter colour and a closer reckoning with observed daylight, while retaining his appetite for densely built forms. ^{[1] [2]}

The change was public as well as pictorial. Cézanne joined the first independent exhibition now known as the Impressionist exhibition in 1874, missed the second in 1876, and returned with a substantial display in 1877. His participation places him within the group’s history; the works themselves show why a single stylistic label is less revealing than looking closely at what he painted. ^{[3] [4]}

From an acquaintance to a shared working landscape

Cézanne met Pissarro during his Paris stays in the early 1860s, in a circle that also included Armand Guillaumin. A decade later their connection took on the practical intensity of painting in the countryside northwest of Paris. The Musée Granet’s chronology places Cézanne between Auvers, Pontoise and Valhermeil, while also recording his continued stays in Provence. In 1873 he worked beside Pissarro between Pontoise and Auvers, where Hortense and their young son were living. The geography matters: this was no abstract conversion to an art movement, but repeated encounters with lanes, slopes, orchards and village buildings at particular sites. ^[1]

Pissarro had a sustained outdoor practice and helped Cézanne attend to the effects of light in colour. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the contrast with Cézanne’s 1860s paintings, where strong dark-light opposition and thick pigment often carried dramatic subjects. In the 1870s, outdoor painting and a lighter palette became more prominent. Yet the comparison should not turn Pissarro into the sole author of Cézanne’s development. Cézanne had painted landscape earlier, remained attached to Provençal places, and could respond to a common motif with a more compact, weighty arrangement than Pissarro’s. Their relationship supplied working conditions, conversation and example; each canvas still has to be judged on its own terms. ^{[2] [1]}

A dated Auvers house

In House of Père Lacroix , a pale house with a warm tiled roof sits among trees above a narrow stretch of water. Short yellow and green marks gather around the wall; longer, multicoloured strokes carry the reflection downward. Blue and mauve shade the sunlit building, so light appears through neighbouring colours rather than a hard outline. The National Gallery of Art’s account draws attention to this contrast with Cézanne’s earlier dark painting. The house remains a firm block within the broken colour of leaves and water, showing how outdoor light and architectural weight could occupy the same small canvas. ^[5]

Cézanne signed and dated the Auvers painting “73”; the current catalogue identifies it as FWN 77. That rare firm date makes it a useful point of comparison with less securely dated works of the period. The catalogue associates it with the 1874 show’s broadly titled Auvers landscape study, an identification taken up below. ^[6]

The nearby Hanged Man’s House in Auvers offers a different spatial problem. Its steep paths divide and reconnect around roofs and walls; lightened earth colours sit in notably thick, worked paint. A viewer can sense outdoor observation and, at the same time, the pressure Cézanne places on the relations between parts of the scene. The 1874 catalogue listed it as no. 42. Those details help make the term “Impressionist years” useful without making all of the paintings look or behave alike. ^{[7] [3]}

A circle of artists, households and supporters

The Auvers period had a domestic setting. Hortense and Paul were with Cézanne there in 1873, while Pissarro’s home and practice centred on nearby Pontoise. Dr Paul Gachet, who lived in Auvers and supported artists, owned Cézanne’s A Modern Olympia : the 1874 exhibition catalogue explicitly says that the picture belonged to him. This is firmer evidence for a real local network than a story in which two painters simply set up easels in isolation. Works moved between studios and sympathetic owners before they reached a broad public. ^{[1] [8] [3]}

The subjects moving through that circle were varied. The Cézanne catalogue dates the Orsay still life Nature morte à la soupière (FWN 726) to 1877 and places its making in Pissarro’s Pontoise studio; the work later belonged to Pissarro. The picture contains a landscape by Pissarro dated 1873 in its background. A painting inside a painting thus gives this studio scene another layer of exchange, while the earlier date belongs to the depicted landscape. ^[9]

Three works at the first exhibition, 1874

The first independent group exhibition opened in the former studio rooms of the photographer Nadar at 35 boulevard des Capucines on 15 April 1874. It was organised by artists seeking a way to show work outside the official Salon system. Cézanne’s catalogue entries offer a compact account of his range: no. 42, La maison du Pendu, à Auvers-sur-Oise ; no. 43, Une moderne Olympia , described as a sketch and lent by Dr Gachet; and no. 44, Étude: Paysage à Auvers . The original title of no. 44 names the place without identifying the house; the current catalogue considers House of Père Lacroix its match. ^{[3] [6]}

The three works were not a matched set of quick landscape impressions. The Hanged Man’s House dealt with a village view and thick paint. A Modern Olympia , dated 1873–74 in the current catalogue, reworked the modern nude and the act of looking in a compact, theatrical figure scene. Showing these together exposed the span of Cézanne’s practice at a moment when he was learning from outdoor observation. An exhibition label can identify a group; it cannot erase the distance between a charged studio composition and a road through Auvers. ^{[8] [7]}

The reviews took different sides. Léon de Lora included The Hanged Man’s House among the excellent landscapes in Le Gaulois on 18 April; Émile Zola, writing in Le Sémaphore de Marseille the same day, singled out a Cézanne landscape for originality. Louis Leroy’s satirical review in Le Charivari mocked the dense paint of The Hanged Man’s House and made A Modern Olympia a joke. These notices disagree about works being seen at the same event. Count Armand Doria acquired The Hanged Man’s House , probably during the exhibition, although the sale does not appear in the exhibition society’s surviving receipts. The purchase shows that hostile press was not the whole of its first public life. ^[3]

The missing year and the return of 1877

Cézanne did not exhibit in the second group show, held at Durand-Ruel’s premises in 1876. The omission is clear; the motive is less so. Georges Rivière later explained it as Cézanne’s reluctance to show in a dealer’s space, while the Société Paul Cezanne’s chronology points to a contemporary letter suggesting he may not have been invited. Neither piece of evidence lets us state a settled private reason. His April 1876 letter to Pissarro is more direct evidence of continuing contact: from Aix he discussed the exhibition’s reviews, Chocquet’s news, weather that threatened fruit and vines, and Pissarro’s prospects for sales. Granet translates one short turn in the letter as “painting endures.” The phrase belongs to a practical, affectionate letter, not a declaration that Cézanne had left the group. ^{[10] [1]}

At the third exhibition, from 4 to 30 April 1877 at 6 rue Le Peletier, the name “Impressionist” appeared at the entrance. The catalogue lists sixteen works by Cézanne, and a contemporary account records one further seashore scene outside it. The entries included still lifes, flowers, four landscape studies, The Bathers , a tiger, a woman figure, a man’s head and three watercolours. This was much more than a repeat of the two Auvers landscapes and figure painting shown in 1874. It placed his investigation of observed nature beside invented or studied figures and arrangements of objects. ^[4]

The catalogue’s generic titles create limits for anyone reconstructing exactly which canvas hung where. Some landscape entries have competing later identifications, and the woman figure is associated only tentatively with a particular portrait. What is secure is the breadth of the display. It also exposes an important development across subjects: in still life, the Met sees Cézanne beginning to replace heavy contrast and encrusted pigment with subtler neighbouring tones that give objects dimension. In the landscapes, the same years involved a closer study of outdoor colour. The change did not happen identically or all at once on every canvas. ^{[4] [2]}

The 1877 press again disagreed. Georges Rivière defended the strength of Cézanne’s work in L’Impressionniste , while other writers mocked his bathers and portraits. A contemporary commentator even described Pissarro and Cézanne as forming distinct “schools” within the larger school, an awkward compliment to their difference. Cézanne’s place in the show was visible, but visibility did not produce agreement. The group offered a public framework broad enough to contain divergent approaches to colour, figures and landscape. ^[4]

What continued after the exhibitions

The 1877 display was Cézanne’s last in the Impressionist group’s exhibitions. Granet records continued movement between northern France and Provence, including later time in Pontoise with Hortense and Paul and travel with Pissarro. The exhibitions ended for Cézanne; working contact and outdoor painting continued. ^[1]

An undated draft to Marius Roux, placed around 1878 by the current catalogue, refers to Cézanne’s “petite personnalité de peintre impressionniste”—his small identity as an Impressionist painter. Because it is a draft, it cannot prove that Roux received this self-description. It does show that the label was available to Cézanne himself after the 1877 exhibition, even as his practice exceeded any single formula attached to it. He continued to work between places and genres, carrying lessons in outdoor light into the slower construction of colour and form that later viewers associate with his name. ^{[11] [1] [2]}

For a wider account of those movements and relationships, see the Cézanne biography . The paintings of the 1870s are especially rewarding when read beside their exhibition records: the same period could produce an Auvers house, a modern figure scene, a tureen in a studio and a watercolour study. Their differences make the Pissarro years more vivid than a simple before-and-after story.