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Part 3 of 4 In Part 2 of this series, I focussed on Julie Pissarro’s busy life in Eragny sur Epte. In Part 3, I am going to discuss her interests beyond being a wife, mother and homemaker. I also want to dispel the image of Julie as ‘illiterate’, a word that is often usedContinue reading “Julie Pissarro: an Homage”

Part 2 of 4 Beginning in 1863, the year that their eldest son Lucien was born, Camille and Julie no longer lived full time in Paris because it was simply too expensive. For more than twenty years the family moved from one rented house to another, principally in and around the Pontoise area, about 25kmContinue reading “Julie Pissarro: an Homage”

Part 1 of 4 I want to begin this article with a description of a painting: Camille Pissarro’s The Garden, Éragny, (1898), now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The painting provides an appropriate starting point to an article that will be an homage to Julie Pissarro. The painting isContinue reading “Julie Pissarro: an Homage”

Part 2 of the Les Thibault series Plot Summary Here I present an overview of the main developments (with spoilers), but there are many small and beautiful details that cannot be captured in a plot summary. I do not, for example, mention the lovely little passages about the character Gise, the young half-Malagasy girl whoContinue reading “Le Penitencier [The Reformatory], 1922”

On 4 November 2021, Patrick Bernard (https://modernnature.productions/) and I took a trip to Norwood and Crystal Palace to walk in the footsteps of Camille Pissarro and his extended family. Patrick and I have done this before, when we walked in the footsteps of the eponymous hero of W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, in which Jewish LondonContinue reading “Walking in Their Footsteps: The Pissarro and Isaacson Families in Norwood and Crystal Palace”

Introduction This is a 4-part essay in which I discuss life on an island. This won’t be a comprehensive examination of this subject since I’ll be restricted to what I know: stories I have learned from friends, from tracing my family roots and from my own year living on an island. There are islands thatContinue reading “Island Life: Thoughts on Closed Communities”

Commentary on works of French literature Book 1: Les Thibault (1922-1940) by Roger Martin du Gard This is the first in a new series in which I write commentaries about notable works of French literature. I’ll have a particular focus on works from the late 19th and early 20th century because I’ve spent the pastContinue reading “Booknotes”

On my website, I have published an essay on the life of Félix Pissarro, the third son of the artist Camille Pissarro (see Art, Anarchy and Other Dangers: the Premature Death of Felix Pissarro). Félix died of tuberculosis in 1897 at the age of 23. This was tragic because he was so young, but alsoContinue reading “‘A Poet’s Day’: the Romance of Félix Pissarro”

Note from the author: all the translations are my own. While reading the letters of Camille Pissarro, I encountered many references to the ‘legs Caillebotte’ (the Caillebotte Legacy) between the years 1894 and 1898. In this article, I wanted to put together the material from the letters and have a closer look at this interestingContinue reading “The Pissarro Letters and the Caillebotte Legacy”

This is a short commentary about a novel that recently came to my attention and which has informed my understanding one of the most historic episodes of the Belle Époque. Jean Barois by the French writer Roger Martin du Gard was published in 1913, the same year that Marcel Proust published the first volume inContinue reading “‘Jean Barois’ and Understanding the Dreyfus Affair”