Leaving a lasting impression
10:02am Friday 19th January 2007
IN a modest cottage in Epping, the painter and bookmaker Lucien Pissarro brought together two of the pivotal artistic movements of the late 19th century.
Pissarro, whose output spanned Impressionism and the Arts and Crafts school, was establishing his place in the London art scene when he moved into 44 Hemnall Street, aged 30, in 1893.
His father was Camille Pissarro, one of the major contributors to the first Impressionist movement.
The Pissarro family came to London as refugees from the Franco-Prussian war when Lucien was a child, but returned home to France as soon as it was safe.
As he grew up, Lucien began to paint and was taught by his father, who also counted Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cezanne among his pupils.
Lucien became an artist in his own right, and by 1890, when he moved to England permanently, he had already displayed alongside the great Impressionist masters including his father.
As he developed his technique, the young artist also drew from the pointillist innovations of Seurat and Signac, who built up their pictures using tiny coloured dots.
Eventually, Pissarro's presence in the London art scene would help secure the reputation of Impressionism in Britain.
But in the early 1890s, despite taking the Paris art world by storm, the movement had not yet become fashionable or - more importantly - lucrative, in Britain. Pissarro's move showed he was determined to make a living independent of his father's reputation, but he had to rely on hand-outs from his family to survive.
So, parallel to his painting, Lucien turned to printmaking in an attempt to scrape by.
He had started producing woodcuts during his time in France, and thanks to the Arts and Crafts Movement, led by Walthamstow-born William Morris, the medium was becoming increasingly popular.
Morris concentrated on hand-made, practical objects like wallpaper, furniture or books, and argued against the privileged status enjoyed by "high art" forms like painting and sculpture.
The year after Lucien arrived in London, Morris launched his Kelmscott Press, which produced a series of beautifully-designed books often adorned with lithographic woodcut-style decorations and illustrations.
The example inspired Pissarro to set up his Eragny Press, named after his home town, and production got underway after Lucien and his wife Esther set up home in Epping.
Between 1894 and 1914 the couple produced 32 books, mainly illustrated with bold woodcuts by Pissarro.
Letters from the time give us some insight into the artist's thoughts on the area.
Tony O'Connor, from Epping Forest District Museum, said: "He thought it was somewhere just beginning to develop. It was a little limited and a little far out for him, but it had potential.
"He wrote to his mother that for the price of two furnished rooms in Bayswater, he could have a full house with studio and garden in Epping."
Pissarro called his new home Eragny House, and soon after the move Pissarro's only child, Orovida, was born.
She was schooled locally, and her mother noted with dismay that she had picked up an Essex accent, which she derided as having a "horrible, sort of singing cockney" sound.
Epping may have skewed his daughter's diction, but it did at least stimulate Pissarro's imagination.
Mr O'Connor argues: "The landscape affected his art. You really see in some of the woodcuts that the forest had a huge impact and provided the background and inspiration for some of the images he uses.
"He drew from the landscapes around Epping, the local villages and the fields down towards Copped Hall."
Pissarro commented: "Epping resembles Eragny a lot, but the views are vaster. there are pretty cottages and a great forest of which some parts are very wild."
In launching his own publishing company, Pissarro was not trying to rival William Morris's cottage industry or simply cashing in. Along with Charles Ricketts, who collaborated with Pissarro and launched his own Vale Press, they had similar aims and shared ideas.
"There will have been cross-fertilisation. In the woodcuts, there are parallels in the imagery, and Lucien and William Morris would have taken ideas from each other.
"In a lot of the books and lithographs, you begin to see them both drawing on folk memories and traditions from Europe and Britain," said Mr O'Connor.
In 1897, Lucien Pissarro and his family left Epping to move back to the London art scene. A period of illness followed, but by 1904 he was part of a new movement, the post-Impressionist Camden Town Group, with artists including Augustus John and Walter Sickert.
Pissarro returned to Epping for two months in 1923, during a series of visits that took him around France and Britain. He stayed in Bell Common, and produced three oil paintings and a handful of watercolours.
Apart from the books and paintings inspired by his time in Epping, Lucien Pissarro's life here left another artistic legacy, as Orovida also grew up to be a painter.
Like Lucien, she also learned from her father and his contemporaries, including Sickert. And just as Lucien left the Paris art scene to strike out on his own, Orovida soon removed herself from her father's circle - even going so far as to drop the Pissarro name.
But while much of Lucien's painting can be understood as an adaptation of his father's style, Orovida broke away from Impressionism completely, taking inspiration instead from decorative art and exotic subjects, before moving to a more naturalistic style.
But she did not reject her family heritage all together, and after her earlier rebellion worked to cultivate the Pissarro family archive at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
So far, a total of nine decendants of Camille Pissarro have become artists. Their work can be seen at the Stern Pissarro Gallery in Notting Hill, and works by Lucien, including The Garden, Epping, are on display at Epping Forest District Museum in Waltham Abbey.