Camille Pissarro
The father figure of Impressionism.
Pissarro was the only artist to show at all eight Impressionist exhibitions. He helped and taught Cézanne and Gauguin.
Camille Pissarro was born in 1830 on the island of St Thomas in the Caribbean, then a Danish colony. His parents were Jewish merchants. He went to school in France but returned to work in the family business. He preferred to paint, and in 1852 he went to Venezuela with the Danish artist Fritz Melbye. In 1855 he moved to Paris, where he received advice from Camille Corot and studied at the independent Académie Suisse. There he met Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne.
Pissarro lived with Julie Vellay, who had worked as a cook for his mother. They married in 1871 and had eight children, and several of the sons became artists. The family was poor for many years. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 they fled to London, where he and Monet studied Turner and Constable. When they returned, Prussian soldiers had destroyed a large part of the paintings in his house at Louveciennes.
Pissarro was one of the founders of Impressionism and the only one to take part in all eight Impressionist exhibitions, from 1874 to 1886. He was the oldest in the group and acted as a father figure and teacher. He painted above all the countryside around Pontoise and later Éragny: fields, fruit trees, peasants and village roads. In the mid-1880s he tried Georges Seurat's dot technique for a time.
In old age he developed an eye condition that made it difficult to paint outdoors. Instead he painted from hotel windows in Paris, Rouen and Le Havre. The result was series of boulevards, bridges and harbours in different weather and light, for example the pictures of the Boulevard Montmartre from 1897. Politically he was an anarchist and was committed to the cause of the poor.
Pissarro died in Paris in 1903. He was a generous teacher to both Cézanne and Gauguin. In his later years Cézanne called himself “a pupil of Pissarro”. His patience and willingness to cooperate held together the often divided Impressionist group.