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LUDOVIC-RODOLPHE PISSARRO (1878-1952)

View the Pissarro Paintings

View the Pissarro Woodcuts

Ludovic-Rodolphe Pissarro was born in Paris on the 21st November 1878 and was Camille Pissarro’s fourth son. He soon became known as Rodo and usually signed his work Ludovic-Rodo. Like his siblings, Rodo quickly showed an interest in art and the Pissarro family home was a place of constant artistic discussion and production. Camille had a great gift for encouraging other artists, whether Cézanne and Gauguin or his own children, guiding them without making them feel that they were being forced to imitate him. Rodo thrived in this environment, publishing his first wood engravings in 1894, at the age of sixteen, in the anarchist journal Le Père Peinard. The impact of Camille’s art and teaching on Rodo was obviously considerable, but Rodo was fascinated by the Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec, Maurice de Vlaminck and Raoul Dufy and he produced many images of the cafes and bistros, theatres and circuses, cabarets and nightclubs of the area.

Rodo spent time moving between London and France until, in 1914, he married Fernande Perrinet and, due to the war, moved to Ashford in Kent. He moved to several different addresses in Ashford for the next few years and then in 1918, he moved to Richmond. He often painted views from upper-floor windows, somewhat removed from the bustle of traffic and pedestrians on the street below. In the same way that he had enjoyed observing and recording life in Paris, he began to paint, draw and make wood-cuts of the people he saw around him in London.

Some of these pictures reflect the role of women during this period - they often filled the jobs that the men who were fighting in the War had previously held and their contribution to the war effort was immense. Over 100,000 women joined the forces’ support services, 300,000 worked in munition and countless others in volunteer units. Working class women, well aware of how poor the wages were for such back-breaking work, shied away from the countryside and opted for the munitions factories, where earnings were far more than they were used to. The Women’s Land Army tended to attract more middle and upper class girls drawn to a rose-tinted rustic idyll. Working class women, well aware of how poor the wages were for such back-breaking work, shied away from the countryside and opted for the munitions factories, where earnings were far more than they were used to.

As you look at Rodo’s pictures, you will see that they are all small snapshots of the life and people on the Home Front that Rodo saw in and around London during the First World War.
Rodo is perhaps most remembered today by art historians for undertaking the cataloguing of his father’s work, a project which took him more than twenty years. We, however, must thank him for giving us this wonderful collection of images which are evocative, witty and utterly enchanting.

Acknowledgements :
David Stern and Luci Gosling

 

 

 


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