Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

Lucien Pissarro in Gower by FROOM TYLER To GOWER IN THE SUMMER OF 1933 came Lucien Pissarro, eldest son of the great Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, and an important artist in his own right. He stayed first at Penard, in a house opposite the golf club, where he painted the picture of Cefn Bryn from Penard Castle which is now in the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery collection, and then at Reynoldston, where he completed three pictures. Lucien was then 70 years old and had lived in England for 50 years. He had long ago outgrown the disadvantage which must inevitably be suffered by the son of a famous father following the father's line. Lucien's work had been bought by many of the great galleries, including the Tate, the Courtauld Collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Luxembourg Museum, Paris. Writing to his son from Paris in 1896, Camille had counselled, perhaps on a note of caution understandable at that time,"if you remain in England, rightly or wrongly you will be considered as belonging to English art." But Lucien's special place in the history of modern painting is as the link between French and British art in the epochal years of the late 19th century, or, as a writer in The Times designated him in the centenary year of his birth, "the ambas- sador of Impressionism" in England. As his father influenced the young Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, so Lucien imparted to Sickert and Steer and the young English artists of the Camden Town Group the principles and prac- tice of Impressionism. "Pissarro," wrote Sickert, looking back on those years, "holding the exceptional position at once of original talent, and of the pupil of his father, the authoritative depository of a mass of inherited knowledge and experience, has certainly served us as a guide, or let us say, a dictionary of theory and practice on the road we have elected to travel." And the leading art critic of the 1920s, Frank Rutter, recorded in his book of reminiscences "the immense respect with which John and Sickert, as well as the rest, always listened to anything Pissarro had to say about painting: I felt, and I believe they felt, that Pissarro was the master of us all He had had his years of struggle. He could recall a time when he had had to leave Sickert and Spencer Gore at the door of the Cafe Royal because he had learnt that the price of a meal was three shillings and he had only two in his pocket. At various times when he was in need of money he had sold his father's pictures for sums that were fractional compared with the prices they would fetch today. One of Camille's last and finest paintings, Le Pont Royal et le Pavilion de Flore, was sold in 1925 for 600 guineas. At the same time he sold