Authors: Susan Vreeland
“With her hands on her hips, she declares, ‘A negotiation. I consider four frames made without charge and on short order worth that one small painting.’
“The painter flinched and cast his eyes at the painting. Finally, he turned to me with resolution and said, ‘And so do I, young man.’
“He shook my hand, and I became a frame crafter, a collector, and a friend on the spot.”
“And he was Pissarro?”
“The very man. Camille Pissarro.”
I clapped my hands for him, the second time since we had arrived, the only appropriate reaction to his tale.
CHAPTER FIVE
PASCAL, PISSARRO, PONTOISE, AND PURPOSE
1937, 1875
A
FTER WE WERE IN
R
OUSSILLON A FEW WEEKS,
A
NDRÉ WENT
to Maurice’s house to ask if he knew of any frame shop in Avignon when Pascal came out to the courtyard, where I was shelling peas in the shade of the lean-to. He sat close beside me, shaking a half sheet of paper.
“Almost
boules
time,” I said.
“This first. I slept in fits and starts last night, because I was so afraid that I might forget something.”
“About what?”
“Pissarro, of course. He told me to come to Pontoise on the Jewish Sabbath. That’s where he lived when he was not visiting other painters in Paris. I remember him saying, ‘On the Sabbath Julie always reminds me that I must not paint, and because all the colors of the rainbow are in her eyes, I cannot refuse her. Sometimes, though, if the fire in me is burning hot, I must, but I always apologize with a kiss.’ ”
“That’s nice.”
“His house clung to a hillside near a stream in the quarter called the Hermitage. He wore a stained, broad-brimmed felt hat and rumpled trousers tucked into tall, mud-caked boots.”
I looked at Pascal’s own rumpled trousers. “Like the men do around here?”
“Try not to interrupt me, Lisette. I’m sorry, but it makes me forget what I was saying.
“So on that same day he welcomed me with outstretched arms, took me inside, and introduced his wife and children to me, all of them busy and making noise, but amid all that hubbub, Camille wore an expression of absolute contentment. He had an amazing capacity to lift himself out of sadness.”
“What do you mean? How?”
“Please. Just listen. That first show of his group failed, and they lost all their investment. He only sold one painting for some pitiful price. The press cut them all to shreds. I thought he might give up, but no. He was working with fierce energy for the second show, as if some great success had spurred him on.”
“Did you bring him a frame?”
“Yes, I did, made according to a note he had sent to Julien. In between calls on pigment customers, I had made half a dozen frames over a year’s time and had begun to carve the moldings with simple leaves or arabesques at the corners. I had taught myself how to design a curve loosely so that I could carve it more easily, how to make a smooth, shallow groove with a U-gouge, how to prevent the V-gouge from digging too deeply by pressing down and forward on its handle instead of tapping with the mallet. I brought him the last of them, my most complex, with arabesques all around.
“He
admired
it, Lisette, and said that I had progressed rapidly. Can you understand what that meant to me?”
I did understand it, and it revealed him to me in a new way. I saw the humility in this man whom I would have loved to have had as a father.
“So Camille says to me, he says, without bitterness, as though it were the lot of all painters, ‘I haven’t a sou, but you can choose a painting from this row for yourself.’
“Just think of that, Lisette. He let
me
choose. He went back
outside, and I was left to look at the paintings. Sowers, plowmen, hay wagons, haystacks, barges on the Oise, the hillside of cultivated land behind the Hermitage, a town square on market day. It was agony to choose.”
“I should think so,” I remarked. I tried to plant these subjects in my mind so that when we went back to Paris I might be able to pick out a Pissarro painting in a gallery, but I was afraid my memory wasn’t as good as Pascal’s.
“Later Camille asked what I thought of them, and he chuckled like a bashful boy, this grown man with a long, untrimmed beard. He was starving for a mite of praise from somebody outside his group of painters. The dear unwanteds, he called them.
“ ‘What about praise from an ochre miner?’ I asked him. ‘What’s that worth?’
“ ‘From a pigment salesman with a good eye for color? Plenty,’ he said. I’ll never forget that. I only claimed an eye for the seventeen hues we made from ochre. I think I told him that his colors were in harmony, and that his little dabs that didn’t mean anything up close looked like the real thing from a distance. I felt like a fool talking like that. All I wanted to do was to look at more paintings. He stood like a carved hunk of wood, waiting for me to say more. I could feel him suffering there, waiting, so I said something like this: ‘You know, the painting you gave me, of the yellow-ochre path? It makes me notice the range of ochres in all paintings. They make me think I’m doing something good selling those pigments. And the world you paint is one I know. It’s not just beautiful. It’s true. To the countryside. The light.’ That seemed to please him. I wanted to please him, Lisette.”
“I’m sure you did please him.”
“I was overwhelmed by so many paintings and told him so.
“He let out a kind of snort and said he had fifteen hundred once. When he went back to Louveciennes after the Prussian war, he discovered that Prussian soldiers had been living in his house. They used his frames as firewood and made pathways of his paintings so
they wouldn’t muddy their boots. Imagine that, Lisette. They kept their horses indoors in winter and slept upstairs. They used his studio to butcher sheep and his paintings as aprons. He had to dig out from the floor a thick layer of dung and dried blood that covered more paintings. Twenty years’ work, and he was able to save only forty canvases.” Burning with outrage, Pascal bellowed, “The barbarians!”
I flinched and dropped a pea pod on the ground.
“That painting of the girl and the goat?” I asked. “You said it was done in Louveciennes?”
Pascal nodded.
“Then it must have been one of the forty.”
The stark realization of its narrow escape made it more valuable in my eyes, made me want to be in Paris all the more in order to search out all the other Pissarro paintings of Louveciennes.
Pascal passed a moment in reflection before continuing.
“Camille just stood there, this big man, watching me sputter, needing me to sputter, me, a laborer who knew nothing but what I loved. Do you understand, Lisette? He was heroic to keep on going. Unaccountably heroic. For years afterward, dozens of women wore the canvases of his looted paintings as aprons while doing their laundry along the Seine.”
“What a pretty sight that must have been, all of them lined up along the bank, wearing his paintings.”
“You don’t understand! It was a crime! They had
stolen
them! And
they
glared at
him
when he returned to Louveciennes because he had spent the Prussian war safely painting in England.”
Maybe they had lost their sons or husbands, I thought, but that justification didn’t satisfy me. I could only imagine one day having the chance to tell the rich gallery visitors in Paris this story. I wanted them to feel the outrage and injury Pascal and I felt. In that moment, I was beginning to glimpse my purpose here.
I finished shelling the peas and stood up to take them inside.
“Sit down. There’s more I have to say.”
I overlooked his rudeness. It was only his passion to be sure someone heard his story. “There’s more?”
“He told me about a fine painter in his group who encouraged everyone else. Frédéric Bazille was his name. Idealistic but stubborn, Camille told me. The army wouldn’t admit him because he refused to shave his beard, so he joined the Zouaves, which had no such regulation. They were engaged in the fiercest fighting. He was killed in Beaune-la-Rolande, an inconsequential battle. ‘We grieved for the loss of that good man,’ Camille said, ‘so what sense does it make to mourn the loss of paint on cloth?’ ”
To think of the great paintings that might have been, Pissarro’s and this man Bazille’s, was enough to make
me
grieve. Pascal might have collected a painting by Bazille, and I would be able to see it hanging here with the others.
“Camille took me outside to see the view from his house. What he told me was important, so I wrote it down.”
Pascal read from his paper slowly, contemplating each thought. “He said, ‘When a man finds a place he loves, he can endure the unspeakable. Pontoise was designed especially for me. The random pattern of cultivated fields and wild patches, the orchards that have given their pears to generations, the rich smell of this earth, the windmills and water wheels and smokestacks, the stone houses all a-kilter, even the pigeons dumping on the tile roofs—everything here moves me. I belong here as much as that stream by my house which runs into the Oise and then to the Seine and on to the sea. Everything is connected here. That stream quenched the thirst of Romans, even of Celts before them. When I paint it, they are a part of me. When I walk this land, there is a painting waiting for me around every bend. Isn’t there a hunger in every human being to find a place in the world that gives to him so richly that he wants to honor it by giving back something of worth?’ ”
Pascal stopped speaking and folded his paper. I wanted to tell him that I agreed with Pissarro, but I would be referring to Paris, and saying so might hurt his feelings.
“So I want to give something back to Roussillon,” he said.
I nodded my understanding. What was true for him about Roussillon didn’t make it true for me. But the principle, that I could embrace.
“And now I’m going to tell you about the perfect gift Camille gave me. In his studio I took another look at a group of paintings of a sprawling factory with several smokestacks that dominated the plain directly across from the Hermitage, the quarter in Pontoise where he lived after he left Louveciennes. Those paintings didn’t have any relationship to me.
“ ‘How about this?’ Camille asked, and pulled from the back of the stack a small painting of a factory built of stone. ‘It’s the Arneuil paint factory in Pontoise,’ he said.
“Then I recognized it! I had sold ochre pigments there! ‘That’s the painting I want!’ I said.
“Come back inside, Lisette, and really look at it with me.”
He had given this painting a space by itself between the two south windows. He stood transfixed in front of it, and for some time, we were not in the house. He was there, in front of the factory.
Nondescript
was what I thought of it, a word Sister Marie Pierre had taught me. The painting showed a blocklike building with a peaked roof, taller than the nearby houses set against a hillside of trees. The creamy yellow stone of the smokestack and factory caught the light and made the whole scene mellow. That was all I could see in it.
“I like the color of the building.”
“
Jaune vapeur
, we called it. Inside that building, at long lines of tables, dozens of workers turned raw pigments into paint and filled the tubes Tanguy sold to Pissarro, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and others—the hues
we made
in the furnaces of the Usine Mathieu, our factory right here in Roussillon, as well as those made from other substances. Red roots of the
garance
plant cultivated here in the Vaucluse, sap from Turkish trees, powders of blue stones from Siberian and Afghani riverbanks, dried blood of South American
beetles that fed on cactus—all the colors of the world on their way to become paintings. I saw it, those colors.
“In the meadow, there, in front of the factory, see, Lisette? The tallest man? I imagine that it’s me calling upon the purchasing agent.” He lowered his chin, as though a little embarrassed to reveal this.
Right then I understood why Pascal had chosen that painting. Despite its ordinariness, it spoke to him of his purpose, his participation in the world of art, the link in the chain from mine to majesty, and therefore it merited being hung alone.
I looked around the
salle
at his seven paintings. Was there any one that spoke to me of my purpose? What was my purpose anyway? It had to be something greater than shelling peas. But today, and in the days to come, it was to absorb all that Pascal was telling me so that I might impress Monsieur Laforgue. Beyond that, I couldn’t see.
“Someday, Lisette, the world will love the
jaune vapeur
on that building.”
“He’s famous now, this Monsieur Pissarro,
n’est-ce pas
?”
“By the time Camille was an old man, his paintings sold well for high prices. I could never buy one then. He had a framer from the guild carve intricate frames and cover them with real gold leaf. He was far beyond what I could make or trade for.”
“So you treasure them all the more?”
“No, Lisette!” he bellowed. “Not because they’re valuable. I treasured each one the day I acquired it, for what it meant to me.”
“Oh.”
“That isolated paint factory makes my heart swell even today. Every miner I ever knew, every sore back, every day they never saw the sun, every choking breath, and every tongue caked with ochre dust—Maurice, Aimé Bonhomme, my father, and I swinging our pickaxes in rhythm all day long—all of that is in this painting. And it’s in the painting of the girl walking up the ochre path with her
goat. And the history of Roussillon is in this one of the tile roofs of the Hermitage in Pontoise. Those roofs are stained red-orange from Roussillon pigments. And the red ground and the row of bushes aflame—that’s Roussillon red-ochre. That may not mean anything to you now, but if you had lived here all your life and had seen those miners come home filthy and exhausted, it would.”
I
THOUGHT HE HAD
finished talking for the day until I heard him murmur,
“Red Roofs, Corner of a Village, Winter.”
Then
“Le Verger, Côtes Saint-Denis à Pontoise,”
as if one title wasn’t enough. “Six roofs,
ocre rouge
. Five chimneys,
jaune nankin clair
. Six fields on the hillside behind—
vert foncé
, green so rich and dark it must have been spinach growing there;
ocre de Ru
, pale, like wheat;
ocre rouge; vert de chou
, the light green of a cabbage; rose earth; and the duller olive green,
vert Véronèse.
”