Virgin Islander

Almost as confusing to young art students as Monet and Manet are Pisano, Picasso and Pissarro. Niccola Pisano (1206-80) was a famed sculptor of the Italian Renaissance. Hulking Pablo Picasso, at 54, remains the highest priced of all modernist painters. Camille Pissarro was the French Impressionist who looked like Monet. Last week the firm of Durand-Ruel, which has had almost a monopoly on Impressionist paintings for 50 years, gave at its Manhattan galleries the most complete one-man show of Pissarro's paintings the U. S. has seen.

Most famed native of the Virgin Islands yet to appear on the world scene, Camille Pissarro was born a Danish citizen in 1830. Pissarro's father, a French Jew of Portuguese descent, had done quite well for himself as a hardware dealer on the island of St. Thomas. He sent little Camille to Paris to school, brought him back to the Islands to make an ironmonger of him. Camille Pissarro stuck it out until 1852, when he ran away to Venezuela to become an artist. Three years later he was in Paris and had discovered the painter whom above all others he wished to imitate. Kindly, aging Jean Baptiste Corot took the young Virgin Islander as a pupil.

Painting hard, occasionally exhibiting, Camille Pissarro soon joined a group of artists including Manet, Monet, Degas, Renoir, Cezanne and Sisley who used to meet at a cafe known as Le Guerbois, on the Avenue de Clichy. In the oceans of talk at that cafe, the group gradually evolved theories of painting. They wanted to paint light, and they wanted to throw aside the moldy palette of the Academicians for pure tones, yellows, vermilions, emerald-greens. The friends of the cafe Guerbois had no name for them selves until April 15, 1874 when the Photographer Nadar lent them his gallery for a large exhibition. Among the pictures was one by Claude Monet entitled Impression, Sunrise. One Louis Leroy, critic of Charivari, blasted the show and picked on this one picture as typical of what he considered the faults of the entire school. He titled his review "Exposition des Impressionnistes." The name stuck.

Camille Pissarro became the unofficial secretary of the group, writing to dealers, arranging shows, patching quarrels. As anyone walking round last week's exhibition could see, Impressionist Pissarro liked his friends' painting almost too well. He painted sometimes like Millet, sometimes like Cezanne, sometimes like Sisley, sometimes like Mary Cassatt. When his friend Seurat invented a technique of painting with tiny blobs of pure color, Camille Pissarro tried that too. In that manner is possibly the most effective canvas in last week's exhibition--the Dieppe railway train disappearing into a green forest beyond a yellow corn field.

Camille Pissarro never made much money. If he got $500 for a canvas he thought he was doing well. Fame came to him late in life. With a beard every bit as large and white as that of his friend Monet, and evening clothes of black velvet, he was idolized by young Bohemians of the 1890's, loved to preside at the Impressionists' monthly dinners in the cafe Riche. He died Nov. 13, 1903 of an abscessed prostate gland.

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