Review: “Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism” at the Denver Art Museum

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An impressionist painting featuring a tall white stucco house on the right and a dirt lane on the left flanked by short flowering plants and a tall hedge — Camille Pissarro, *The Garden of Les Mathurins, property of the Deraismes Sisters, Pontoise* (*Le Jardin des Mathurins, Pontoise, propriété des soeurs Deraismes*), 1876. Oil on canvas; 44 5/8 × 65 1/8 in. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri: Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust. Image courtesy akg-images/ De Agostini Picture Lib. / J. E. Bulloz

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

One of the many reasons that A.I. slop is never going to replace real art is that people like details. When someone visits a gallery or museum, they want to encounter an image that they can linger over or return to. Even if artificial intelligence can someday stop putting extra fingers in subway advertisements, it’s never going to be able to make something that you can hang in your home and admire for many years. The art generated by A.I. is always going to be fast and slick. The details that make you fall in love with a work emerge from the unique hand of a skilled craftsperson, ideally one with some weird psychological stuff on top of that.

Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) was not the most insane Impressionist, but you always need to lend him some of your attention when you encounter his work at a local museum. The newly opened “The Honest Eye: Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism” makes the case that the artist should stand shoulder to shoulder with his crazier peers. Organized by the Denver Art Museum in collaboration with the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany, the exhibition brings together more than 100 paintings and objects from nearly 50 international museums and private collections.

Pissarro was older than the other artists who would be grouped in the Impressionist movement, and the exhibition takes its name from a letter in which he tells his son that he finds it to be “honest.” It was a more realistic way of looking at the world that bucked tradition. Pissarro was born on what are today the Virgin Islands, which mentee Paul Cézanne later called lucky, since there Pissarro “learned to draw without a master.” At a time when plein-air painting was revolutionary, he learned by doing these in Venezuela.

He was ready to be unconventional with color, too—there’s just so much more of it in the New World—but one of the earlier works in this show, Lordship Lane Station, East Dulwich (1871), uses it sparingly. A fan of the utopian writings of Pyotr Kropotkin, Pissarro captures not just the texture of the train’s steam, but what it portends for industrializing England. Compare this to The Garden of Les Mathurins, property of the Deraismes Sisters, Pontoise (1876), which is an absolute symphony. The lush colors and complicated textures of so many species may even be metaphorical, as the woman reading near the gazing globe could be the activist Maria Deraismes, who shared Pissarro’s politics. It’s possible that this was the site of proto-feminist gatherings.

His people hid as many secrets as his landscapes. The subject of Young Peasant Girl Wearing a Straw Hat (1881) holds her hands with a hint of anxiety or thoughtfulness. Her gaze has drifted to something we can’t see, but you can also tell that she isn’t really looking at it. Behind her, the countryside undulates with potential to the point that it almost becomes abstract. Pissarro’s eye wasn’t just honest, it was a ravenous data collector that helped him create scenes of incalculable influence.

“The Honest Eye: Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism” is on view at the Denver Art Museum through February 8, 2026.