FRAGMENTARY IMPRESSIONS: CAMILLE PISSARRO AND FRANCISCO OLLER IN THE AMERICAS, 1848–1898

Abstract

Though the term “Impressionism” typically conjures up images of the lively cafés and grand boulevards of nineteenth-century Paris, multiple members of this seminal artistic cohort possessed close professional, familial, and historic ties to the Americas, leading them to mine these regions for artistic inspiration. Caribbean-born artists Camille Pissarro (US Virgin Islands, 1830–1903) and Francisco Oller (Puerto Rico, 1833–1917) lived and worked in Europe and the Americas, presaging, adapting, and even abandoning the ideological precepts and aesthetic language of Impressionism at different moments throughout their careers. The existence of these understudied networks of artistic production and exchange challenge the Benjaminian notion of Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century, revealing the highly globalized nature of the art world during a moment of extraordinary political volatility and social change. This project explores the work of Caribbean contemporaries Pissarro and Oller within the social, political, and artistic milieus of the Americas in the nineteenth century. My project follows their work across oceans and hemispheres, travels often undertaken by artists in the age of telegraphy, railroads, and steamships, and yet rarely pursued by the scholars who study them. As a result, the unilateral relationship between Paris and the world gives way to a rhizomatic web of hemispheric and transatlantic exchanges where understudied geographic locals such as Caracas, Venezuela, Charlotte-Amalie, St. Thomas, and San Juan, Puerto Rico emerge as critical points of artistic encounter. In departing from the hegemony of the Parisian metropolis, the global entanglements of nineteenth-century artistic production, rarely broached in the art historical literature, can be more fully understood.