They scrambled forever for funds, for paints, canvases and frames, for a collector or dealer who might sponsor them.

But Pissarro and the rest of them had no idea in those days that they were great.

Among the others, an astonishing array: Renoir, Sisley, Manet, Monet, Seurat, Morisot, Degas, Cezanne. Manet was just one of the great names of the times that Pissarro knew and worked with. Discussing a painting by Edouard Manet, a contemporary critic wrote, “If ever I write a single line in praise of ‘Olympia’ I authorize you to exhibit me some place with that bit of praise tied around my neck.” In the well-known story, John Ruskin, Oxford professor, authority on art and architecture, esteemed by Proust (until Proust tired of him), referred to Whistler’s work as “a pot of paint (flung) in the public’s face.” Whistler’s “The White Girl” (now in the Washington National Gallery of Art), certainly a decorous and inoffensive-enough painting, was reviled when it was shown in the Salon des Refuses, this “Salon of the Rejected” being the best the Impressionists could do for themselves. It is a constant, recurring riddle, a cliche, how great works of art, when they first come into the world, are vilified. “But how do I get there?” The world was new, as it is for all of us somewhere in our beginnings. “This is where I belong,” he said to himself, aspiring and absorbed. He saw the work of Corot, Daubigny, Rousseau, Delacroix. He wandered along the Paris streets, among the different gallery rooms. He arrived in town just as the great Paris 1855 Art Exhibition, the first of its kind, opened-a multitude of framed pictures, 5,000 of them, crowding every inch of wall space and rising to the ceiling of the huge exhibition hall.Īs Stone fills in the account, young Pissarro marveled at the display. By this convenient twist of fortune, Pissarro, who had his heart set on becoming an artist, Stone tells us, was able to escape the family business and come to Paris to stay. Thomas in the Caribbean, was owned by the family of Camille Pissarro-around whom Irving Stone has chosen this time to fashion one of his vivid biographical novels. One of these businesses, on the Dutch West Indies island of St. The new steamships, as they appeared on the scene and proliferated, took the crossing in an unbroken jump, thereby making obsolete the ship chandlering businesses on the way. The old-time sailing vessels, coming across the Atlantic from New York and South America, were obliged to stop for provisions.

They Also Ran by Irving Stone