The nondescript peasant of Camille Pissarro’s Hoarfrost (1873) hunches over, gathering firewood in an endless landscape. As an example of Pissarro’s rural imagery, the golden fields seem to swallow him up as he traverses alone through the calm, peaceful scenery. The anarchist intellectual Octave Mirbeau declared that in Pissarro’s depictions of rural life, “man is always in perspective in a vast telluric harmony” (qtd. Thomson, R. 81). The anarchist vision of man in harmony with nature appears again and again in Pissarro’s paintings with his attention to rural themes. Agrarian subjects, peasants in particular, represented the healthy life of people free from confining economic and institutionalized patterns (Herbert 106). An anarchist himself, Pissarro believed in a peaceful society based on rural communities without the oppressive bourgeoisie. Pissarro painted rural images for the majority of his life, choosing to focus on idealized, idyllic scenes without machinery (Thomson, R. 81).
Pissarro belonged to a movement now termed, ‘anarchist-communism’ that incorporated beliefs from economic communism and individual anarchism. Besides being friends with Mirbeau, Pissarro also gave substantial financial assistance to Jean Grave, the dominant figure in the French anarchist-communist movement (Herbert 103). These anarchists thought that man worked best in small groups, with communal, rather than national, collective ownership (Herbert 100). In Pissarro: His Life and Work, Ralph Shikes explains that “anarchism was opposed to all authoritative institutions that curbed man’s freedom – the state (especially), the church, private property, even, some anarchists believed, the family” (Shikes 228). Critics isolate Pissarro’s anarchism to his earlier rural works, linking his idealized, idyllic scenes without machinery to his belief in a peaceful society founded on rural communities (Thomson, R. 81). This easy connection between anarchism and rural imagery satisfies most art historians, but limits any political expression to only a part of Pissarro’s paintings; during the last eight years of his life, Pissarro departed from his rural topics and painted eleven series set in Paris, Rouen, Le Havre, and Dieppe (Brettell vii). However, Pissarro’s anarchist views extended far beyond the timeframe of his rural period. This affinity for the anarchists is perhaps most evident in his stance during the Dreyfus Affair, when he sided with the Dreyfusards against the Army and Church, institutions he regarded as corrupt.
Pictured:
Camille Pissarro, Hoarfrost (1873)