How good is he? Pissarro: Father of Impressionism, at the Ashmolean Museum, reviewed

Two markers: ‘Cottages at Auvers-sur-Oise’ (c.1873) is a sweet especial rural scene of faintly slovenly thatched cottages with, at its centre, an outside privy, its door modestly shut. A discreet little detail. Second, early in the exhibition, Corot’s ‘Duck-Pond’ (1855–60), an indicator of the tradition to which Pissarro belongs — a world of unconsidered trifles, granted a quiet importance. Linda Whiteley’s excellent, informative catalogue essay quotes Pissarro on Corot: ‘Happy are those who see beauty in modest places where others see nothing. Everything is beautiful, the whole secret lies in knowing how to interpret.’ He is writing this credo to his son Lucien in 1893. Later, Cézanne described Pissarro as ‘humble and colossal’.

As a painter, his orientation aligns with modernism’s turn towards the banal — Edward Thomas’s ‘Tall Nettles’, T.S. Eliot’s typist laying out her food in tins, Joyce’s Buck Mulligan slicing open a scone and plastering butter ‘across its smoking pith’. You could say this change of focus began with Jane Austen’s attention to pattens and parcels in Emma and is evident in Chekhov and Gogol’s inclusion of card games in their art. Think of Cézanne’s ‘The Card Players’ with their clay pipes. It’s a long way from Delacroix’s ‘The Death of Sardanapalus’ (1827) with its Cecil B. DeMille teeming welter of naked flesh, where everything is a headline. We are now in the world of small print, a world in which we most of us live — a world of bidding two no trumps at bridge.

So Pissarro is a convenient fit. He is a sympathetic figure. But how good is he? This exhibition, edited since Basel to fit the Ashmolean’s three travelling exhibition rooms, is keen to create context and includes work by Pissarro’s contemporaries — Cézanne, Seurat, Degas, Signac, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin.