Camille Pissarro’s La mère de l’artiste – effet de lumière is a preparatory watercolor study for the artist’s 1899 etching, picturing his mother Rachel Manzano-Pomié Pissarro bedridden and lit by flickering candlelight, just a year before her death. During her final years, Pissarro watched over his mother, executing a number of moving studies of her before her passing in May 1889. Pissarro, among the most notable of the Impressionist painters, was fixated with the effects of light and color on a scene. Rather than the bright Parisian cityscape or the French countryside, here Pissarro turns to an interior scene, capturing the darkness of a bedroom cast in rich blue shadows. His mother’s face, her mouth open and eyes pinched shut, is rendered in a sickly yellow pallor in the glow of her bedside candle. 

Though often defined by the vibrant color of his oil paintings, Pissarro was also a productive printmaker, creating approximately 200 etchings and lithographs during his career. In his prints and small studies, Pissarro would explore specific elements of a composition, here studying the effet de lumière – the effect of light – on a dark indoor scene. Through first painting this image of his mother in watercolor, Pissarro prepared himself to capture the tonal nuances of the composition a year later in drypoint and etching. For this Rembrandtesque etching (Delteil 80), he changed a portion of the title from La mère de l’artiste (The Artist’s Mother) to Grand’mère (Grandmother), detaching himself from the work and suggesting that it was made less for him than for his children – her grandchildren. 

Pissarro’s mother died the same year as the etching was published, at the age of 94. The artist had a complicated relationship with his mother, who did not support his marriage to her former maid, but nonetheless he grieved her passing deeply. His only self-portrait rendered through printmaking was created in the wake of the event, showing him set against a dark background, looking disheveled and mournful.ⁱ The richly emotive qualities of Pissarro’s artwork are fully displayed in the watercolor La mère de l’artiste, where we can see Pissarro work out some of his early grief and frustration though his art.

ⁱ Pissarro’s People: Late Self-Portraits,” The Clark Art Institute, 2011, online