Camille Pissarro
Pissarro worked at the Academie Suisse around 1859 to 1861. He met Paul Cezanne there, beginning a working friendship that ran for decades.
Académie Suisse
Demolished
Outside only
Nothing survives
The informal life-drawing studio on the quai des Orfèvres where anyone could pay to draw from the model without an examination — and where Camille Pissarro met Paul Cézanne around 1861.
- quai des Orfèvres, 75001 Paris
- An informal open studio on the Île de la Cité through the nineteenth century
The place, briefly
The Académie Suisse was not an academy in any official sense. It was a room on the Île de la Cité, run by a former model, where artists paid a small fee to draw from a live model with no teaching, no entrance examination and no jury. That absence of gatekeeping is precisely what made it important.
Camille Pissarro worked there around 1859 to 1861, having recently arrived from the Danish West Indies. So did Paul Cézanne, up from Aix and painfully out of place in Paris. They met in this room, and the working friendship that followed ran for decades — Pissarro effectively taught Cézanne to lighten his palette and paint outdoors in the 1870s, and Cézanne later described himself as Pissarro's pupil.
Claude Monet and Armand Guillaumin passed through the same studio in the same years. For an informal room with no standing, its alumni list is remarkable, and it is a reminder that the decisive institutions of nineteenth-century painting were often the cheap ones.
The block was expropriated in 1905 and demolished in 1906 to expand the Palais de Justice. The quay is walkable; the academy is not there.
Key facts
- An informal open studio — pay a fee, draw from the model, no teaching or jury
- 4 quai des Orfèvres, at the corner of the boulevard du Palais
- Worked there around 1859–1861
- He met Paul Cézanne there; the friendship lasted decades
- Monet and Guillaumin also passed through
- Expropriated 1905, demolished 1906 for the Palais de Justice
Timeline
Pissarro works at the Académie Suisse and meets Cézanne.
The block is expropriated.
It is demolished for the expansion of the Palais de Justice.
On the map
Questions before you go
Where did Pissarro and Cézanne meet?
At the Académie Suisse, an informal drawing studio at 4 quai des Orfèvres on the Île de la Cité, around 1861.
Can you visit the Académie Suisse?
No. The block was expropriated in 1905 and demolished in 1906 to expand the Palais de Justice. The quay remains, the building does not.
What made it different from the École des Beaux-Arts?
There was no entrance examination, no teaching and no jury. You paid for the session and drew. That openness is why so many painters who could not or would not enter the official system passed through it.
People who knew this place
Within walking distance
28 place Dauphine
The apartment on the Île de la Cité from which Camille Pissarro painted twenty-six canvases between October 1901 and May 1902 — the Seine, the Pont Neuf, the Louvre and the statue of Henri IV, all from one set of windows.
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Daniel Halévy's Salon (39 Quai de l'Horloge)
Daniel Halévy's literary salon on the Île de la Cité, where D. H. Lawrence went to a tea in March 1929 and met François Mauriac. It produced the only line about Paris that anyone quotes him on.
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The Seine
The river through Paris, and the thread that runs the length of Giovanni's Room: the crossing at dawn, the men sleeping under the bridges, and the barge where Giovanni is caught.
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3 Rue des Grands-Augustins
Robert and Sonia Delaunay's apartment and studio from 1910 to 1935 — where La Prose du Transsibérien took its colors, and whose key Blaise Cendrars held while the couple waited out the First World War abroad.
Visit the placeThe Friday Letter
Paris, one address at a time.
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.