A Closer Look Inside the Camille Pissarro Exhibition at the Denver Art Museum

Nearly 100 artworks and related ephemera by Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro are expected to go on view as part of the exhibition “The Honest Eye: Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism” at the Denver Art Museum (DAM) next month.

DAM is the only institution in the United States to host the artist’s first major show in 40 years. The show was coorganized with the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany, which is the only other planned venue for the exhibition.

Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro was born in 1830 to French and Portuguese Sephardic Jewish parents on the island of St. Thomas, which was then part of the Dutch West Indies. He cut ties with the family merchant business to become an artist, and then married the family’s maid and established his own family in France. Pissarro was the only painter to show in all eight Paris Impressionist exhibitions.

Through Pissarro’s Impressionist paintings, the show considers the hardships and value of the artist’s personal relationships, among them, his family, working-class neighbors, the surrounding landscape, and celebrated peers Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Edgar Degas, George Seurat, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Mary Cassatt.

A gallery dedicated to Pissarro’s early, lesser-known works inspired by his time living in the Caribbean and Venezuela will also figure into the exhibition.

Among the highlights are some of the most important paintings from Pissarro’s oeuvre—a portion of which have never been shown in the U.S. However, the DAM iteration also includes a number of Pissarro works on loan from such American museums as the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“Pissarro was a true cosmopolitan, and that makes his life so interesting,” DAM director Christoph Heinrich told the Denver Gazette. “There was the belief that we are all in it together. Pissarro shows people in their dignity. ‘Respect’ might be an old-fashioned term these days that nobody wants to take seriously, but Pissarro shows us respect for very different environments and approaches to life. There is this true humanist stripe in all of his work and all of his statements, and how he looked at life is absolutely remarkable.”

Despite high yielding auction records today, with his 1897 canvas Le Boulevard Montmartre, Matinée de Printemps fetching a whopping $32.1 million in 2014, for instance, the artist’s life was characterized by hardship—notably, the cost of his personal and artistic freedom.

Still, however, cocurator Angelica Daneo added, “Pissarro had a hopefulness. He knew turbulent times with personal and economic difficulties, political tensions. Yet through his paintings, his letters, his actions, he showed an unwavering hopefulness and a willingness to go on. There’s a lot to learn from Pissarro — more than from other artists who are more guarded — something very inspiring one can apply to wherever they are in life.”

“The Honest Eye: Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism” goes on view at the DAM from October 26 through February 8, 2026.

Below is a closer look at some of the paintings that will figure into the show.