Excerpt from Letters to His Son Lucien

Lucien Pissarro was twenty years old when he left his parents' home to try his luck in England. Never before had a son of Camille Pissarro been separated from him, and the father was concerned that his eldest should not lack for affectionate advice. In his almost daily letters the impressionist painter drew on his vast experience in life and art to encourage, chide and solace the young Lucien.

It was no easy matter for Lumen, shy and given to dreaming as he was, to leave the house of his parents at Osny near Pontoise, where his brothers and his sister spent their carefree youth in the fields and meadows while their father noted with unconcealed joy the capacities for observation and expression which he found in each of them. Lucien himself had begun to draw at a very early age and, when sent to work in Paris for a firm merchandising English fabrics, he spent the evenings with his friend Louis Hayet making drawings in the cafés and music halls. His mother, who knew only too well the sufferings artists have to endure, had wanted at all costs to prevent her eldest son from choosing his father's profession. However, the young man's employer soon informed the parents that their boy, although in other respects a fine fellow, would never make good in business. After this, Lucien got a job working with hand-made plates for color impressions. His parents finally decided, by the end of 1882, to send him to England to learn the language. In London he found a position with a music publisher, but continued to paint and draw. First he lived at the home of his uncle, Phineas Isaacson, whose wife was the half-sister of Camille Pissarro. Later he took a studio, gave drawing lessons and devoted himself mostly to the art of wood engraving.

Lucien Pissarro often came to France to spend months at a time with his family, which meanwhile had settled in Eragny. But even during these sojourns in France his correspondence with his father was not interrupted. For almost every month Camille Pis sarro went to Paris for a few days to see dealers and collectors, to take in the new exhibitions, to make purchases and to visit his friends. At such times he wrote his son to inform him about every thing. There were also occasions when Lucien himself undertook to go to the capital. His father, thus enabled to continue his work, discussed with him by mail the paintings he was working on at Eragny and sent him news of the children and their mother. This correspondence, which began in 1885 and stopped only with the death of Camille Pissarro twenty years later, was religiously preserved by Lucien.

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