Pissarro, Landscape, Vision, and Tradition

This essay challenges the notion that Pissarro's relationship to tradition was one of rupture and argues that an attention to the art of the past enabled him to transform what he imagined to be the aims of painting, landscape painting in particular. As is made clear by an analysis of the commentary of such critics as Zola, Duret, and Baudelaire, landscape painting and its perceived partialness provided the means by which Pissarro investigated the nature of human vision and his vision and represented the relationship between an embodied painter-viewer and the things he sees (or sees himself touching).