Pissarro, Camille (1830-1903)

Camille Pissarro was a key member of the French Impressionist group of painters. He was born in St. Thomas in the West Indies, where his father was a prosperous merchant. The Pissarro family, French and Jewish in origin, had settled in the Danish colony of St. Thomas a few years earlier. Pissarro received his early education at a boarding school near Paris. Returning to St. Thomas, the young man had little interest in the family business, and spent his time sketching the picturesque port. In 1852, he left for Venezuela in the company of the Danish painter Fritz Melbye, and worked as an artist there for two years. Pissarro settled in France 1855. He arrived in time to see the great Exposition Universelle (World's Fair) which included a large art section. Following the advice of Corot, whose landscapes he had admired at the fair, Pissarro was soon painting and sketching in small towns and villages near Paris, along the Seine, Oise and Marne rivers. He formed friendships with Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, and other future members of the Impressionist group. By the late 1860s, his powerful realist landscapes were praised by the prominent critic Emile Zola. Pissarro's period of residence in England during the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune (1870-71) was a fruitful one for him. After his return to France, he was a key instigator of the first Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, and was the only member of the group to exhibit in all eight Impressionist Exhibitions. Always searching for new means of expression, Pissarro was one of the most innovative of the Impressionists. He was among the first to divide colors, as in his painting The Garden of Les Mathurins at Pontoise, 1876 (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City), where the sunlit path is made up of brushstrokes of pink, blue, white and yellow ochre. Pissarro also excelled at drawing; the largest collection of his drawings is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. In the 1880s, Pissarro joined a younger generation of artists, including Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, and his own son Lucien, in adopting the Neo-Impressionist technique, which used the claims of science to support a new style of painting. In common with many artists and writers of his day, he became a fervent anarchist. He produced a powerful attack on French bourgeois society in his album of anarchist drawings, Turpitudes Sociales, 1889. Pissarro gradually abandoned Neo-Impressionism in the 1890s, preferring a more supple style that better enabled him to capture his sensations of nature. While continuing to depict the landscape and peasants at his rural home in Eragny, he also embarked on a new adventure: cityscape painting. In his portrayals of Paris, Rouen, Le Havre and Dieppe, he explored changing effects of light and weather, while expressing the dynamism of the modern city. Camille Pissarro was actively painting up until the end of his life. He died in Paris in 1903, age 73.