Exhibition On Screen

Without Camille Pissarro, there is no Impressionist movement. He is rightfully known as “the father of Impressionism”.

Born in the West Indies, Pissarro found his passion in paint as a young man in Paris and, by the age of 43, had corralled a group of enthusiastic artists into a new collective. Their first show was scorned by the critics but the group had acquired a new name: the Impressionists. For the next 40 years Pissarro was the driving force behind what has today become the world’s favourite artistic movement.

Pissarro was a dedicated family man, generous with his advice, passionate about experimentation, well-read, socially aware and an anarchist. It was a dramatic path that Pissarro followed and, throughout it all, he wrote extensively to his family. It is through these intimate and revealing letters that this gripping film reveals Pissarro’s life and work.

Filmed on location in France, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Kunstmuseum in Basel. With exclusive access to the most extensive archive of any Impressionist painter and to the first major Pissarro retrospective in four decades, this film explores the enthralling and hugely important biography of an extraordinary artist.

EXHIBITION ON SCREEN presents Lucian Freud: A Self Portrait. One of the most celebrated British painters of our time, Lucian Freud is also one of very few 20th-century artists who portrayed themselves in self-portraiture with such consistency.

Spanning nearly seven decades his self-portraits give a fascinating insight into both his psyche and his development as a painter, from his earliest portrait painted in 1939 to the final one executed 64 years later. This intense and unflinching gaze has produced a body of powerful, figurative works that places him in the forefront of great British painting. Featuring fascinating interviews with past sitters, friends and leading art experts such as Tim Marlow (Artistic Director, Royal Academy of Arts, London) and Martin Gayford (Art Critic and Writer), this intensely compelling documentary reveals the life’s work of a master which, when seen together, represents an engrossing study into the dynamic of ageing and the process of self-representation.