"Pissarro wants to achieve delicacy by means of adjustments of nearly like tones; he keeps from juxtaposing two distant tones and does without the vibrant note which such contrast gives, but strives on the contrary to diminish the distance between two tints by introducing into each one of them intermediate elements which he calls 'passage'. But the neo-impressionist technique is based precisely on this type of contrast, for which he feels no need, and on the violent purity of tints which hurts his eye. He has kept of divisionism only the technique, the little dot, whose raison d'etre is exactly that it enables the transcription of this contrast and the conservation of this purity. So it is easy to understand why he [Pissarro] gave up this means, insufficient as it is by itself."
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, Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien, ed., John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, pp. 135. Note: Paul Signac, in his book De Delacroix au Neo-impressionnisme, tried to explain in this way Pissarro's desertion from Neo-Impressionism around 1890.
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Camille Pissarro
Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro (10 July 1830 – 13 November 1903) was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist landscape-painter with important contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.
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