The eldest of the Impressionists and the only painter to show in all eight of the group's exhibitions, 1874 to 1886.
Camille Pissarro was one of the founders of Impressionism and one of the most influential painters of the nineteenth century. Born in the Caribbean in 1830, he became the central elder of the Impressionist circle in France, painting landscapes, peasants, gardens, villages and eventually the crowded boulevards of Paris. He was the only artist to exhibit in all eight Impressionist exhibitions, and his influence extended from Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne to Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat and the generation that followed.
Pissarro is sometimes overshadowed by Monet, Renoir or Degas, but his place in the history of modern painting is unusually important. He was not simply another Impressionist painter. He helped hold the movement together, encouraged younger artists when their work was still considered radical, and remained willing to change his own style even in middle age. The Ashmolean Museum has described him as a galvanising force behind the emergence of modern art.
His full name, dates, birthplace, wife and children are in the details card at the top of this page.
Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro was born on 10 July 1830, in Charlotte Amalie on the Caribbean island of Saint Thomas. At the time, Saint Thomas belonged to the Danish West Indies; today it is part of the U.S. Virgin Islands. His parents, Rachel Manzana-Pomié and Frédéric Abraham-Gabriel Pissarro, ran a general store in Charlotte Amalie and were practising Jews. Pissarro therefore entered the world far from the Parisian art establishment he would later help overthrow.
His Caribbean origins are one of the most distinctive aspects of the Camille Pissarro biography. He grew up amid a port culture connecting Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas rather than in the artistic circles of France. His family's Sephardic Jewish background also made him something of an outsider throughout his life. The Jewish Museum describes Pissarro as having grown up in a Sephardic Jewish family before becoming interested in anarchism and the lives of working people.
When he was about twelve, his parents sent him to boarding school in Passy, near Paris. There his ability to draw was encouraged. After returning to Saint Thomas as a teenager, however, he was expected to join the family business. Painting was not yet regarded as his career.
Pissarro worked in the shop, but he continued drawing whenever he could. Instead of becoming a merchant, he sketched the harbor, ships, people and landscape around him. That conflict — the respectable family occupation on one side and art on the other — lasted until his early twenties.
One of the least-known but most fascinating chapters of Camille Pissarro's life happened not in France but in Venezuela.
Around 1849 he met the Danish painter Fritz Melbye, who encouraged him to take painting seriously. In 1852, Pissarro made a decisive break with the life his family had planned for him: he left Saint Thomas with Melbye and went to Venezuela without his parents' permission. They worked around Caracas and the coastal town of La Guaira until the mid-1850s.
The young Pissarro drew landscapes, roads, tropical vegetation, villages and people going about everyday life. The subjects are revealing. Long before the mature Pissarro paintings of French farmers and village roads, he had already begun looking closely at ordinary places and ordinary people.
A surviving example is Bridge at Caracas, dated 1854. The watercolor shows an arched bridge, distant hills, tropical vegetation and tiny human figures. It belongs to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
This Venezuelan period deserves much more attention than it usually receives. Pissarro did not become a painter after reaching Paris. By the time he returned to Europe, he had already spent years observing nature and working directly from the world around him.
Pissarro settled in Paris in 1855, arriving during the year of the Exposition Universelle. There he encountered the work of painters who would shape his early development, particularly Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Gustave Courbet. Corot's landscapes and the anti-establishment Realism of Courbet helped show Pissarro another route beyond academic painting.
Between roughly 1859 and 1861 he attended several academies, including the Académie Suisse, where he encountered artists including Claude Monet, Armand Guillaumin and Paul Cézanne. He exhibited at the official Paris Salon several times during the 1860s and also appeared at the Salon des Refusés in 1863.
His early work was darker and more solidly constructed than the luminous paintings for which Impressionism later became famous. Corot and the Realists encouraged him to study actual landscapes rather than invent ideal ones, while Pissarro gradually pushed that principle further through increasingly direct observation outdoors.
This commitment to what was physically in front of him would remain central to Camille Pissarro's art for the rest of his career.
During the 1860s and early 1870s, Pissarro developed close relationships with artists who were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the official Salon system. The group eventually included Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, Berthe Morisot and others.
Their paintings looked unfinished to conservative critics. Brushstrokes remained visible. Shadows could be blue, violet or green. Subjects might be railway stations, cafés, roads, gardens or anonymous people rather than scenes from mythology and ancient history.
In 1874, they organized their own exhibition outside the Salon. It became the first exhibition associated with what would soon be called Impressionism. The independent exhibitions continued, with changing membership, until 1886.
Pissarro holds a distinction no other artist in the movement can claim: he exhibited in all eight Impressionist exhibitions from 1874 to 1886.
That consistency tells us something important about him. Pissarro believed deeply in artistic independence. Other famous members drifted away from the exhibitions, returned to the Salon or became caught up in arguments over who should be included. Pissarro stayed.
He was also older than most of the group. Born in 1830, he was a decade older than Monet. That age difference, combined with his temperament, made him something of an elder statesman. It is one reason he is frequently called the father of Impressionism.
The great subject of Camille Pissarro paintings is everyday life.
He painted roads disappearing into villages, orchards in blossom, kitchen gardens, fields, riverbanks, marketplaces and farm workers. Instead of transforming peasants into heroic symbols, he generally treated their work as a normal part of the landscape around them.
This distinguishes him from some of his Impressionist contemporaries. Monet repeatedly pursued spectacular effects of atmosphere. Degas painted dancers and urban interiors. Renoir became famous for scenes of leisure and sociability. Pissarro returned again and again to people working the land.
The Ashmolean notes that he generally preferred farmers, pastoral scenes and views from his own surroundings rather than the fashionable leisure activities favored by some of his contemporaries.
Those choices were connected to his politics as well as his eye.
Camille Pissarro held radical political beliefs and became sympathetic to anarchist ideas. His politics were not separate from his painting.
He disliked rigid hierarchies and became particularly interested in communities built around cooperation and labor. In paintings such as Two Young Peasant Women of 1891–92, farm workers occupy the center of the canvas with extraordinary calm and dignity.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art directly connects the painting to Pissarro's anarchist sympathies and his concern for an agrarian world being transformed by industrialization.
This is important when looking at a Pissarro landscape. What initially appears to be nothing more than a pleasant French field can also represent a choice about whose lives deserve to be painted.
His farmers are not background decoration for aristocrats. They are the subject.
One of Pissarro's greatest contributions to modern art may have happened outside his own canvases.
He formed an unusually important relationship with Paul Cézanne. During the 1870s the two artists frequently worked beside one another around Pontoise and Auvers-sur-Oise, sometimes painting closely related views.
Pissarro encouraged Cézanne to work outdoors and helped him move away from the much darker, heavier and more dramatic painting of his early career. Their influence was not simply one-directional: as Cézanne developed, his increasingly structured treatment of landscape also affected Pissarro.
A major Museum of Modern Art exhibition devoted to the pair described their development as a process of artistic exchange rather than isolated invention.
That relationship matters because Cézanne would eventually become one of the crucial bridges between Impressionism and twentieth-century modernism.
In other words, part of Pissarro's legacy survives inside Cézanne.
Pissarro played a similar role in the early career of Paul Gauguin.
Before Gauguin became the famous Post-Impressionist painter associated with Brittany and Tahiti, he was a stockbroker who painted as an amateur. He met Pissarro and became something like an unofficial pupil.
Pissarro invited the younger artist into Impressionist circles. Gauguin's early landscapes, still lifes and interiors were strongly influenced by both Pissarro and Cézanne.
It is remarkable how often Pissarro appears at points where modern art changed direction. Cézanne passed through his orbit. Gauguin passed through his orbit. The Neo-Impressionists would soon do the same.
War interrupted Pissarro's life in 1870.
During the Franco-Prussian War, Pissarro — still a Danish national and unable to enter the French army — fled with his family to England. He settled around the Norwood and Crystal Palace area of south London.
The London stay had important consequences. Pissarro met the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who later became one of the most important champions of Impressionism. He also encountered British landscape painting and studied the work of artists such as John Constable and J. M. W. Turner.
When Pissarro returned to France, he discovered that his house at Louveciennes had been occupied during the war and many of the canvases he had left there had been destroyed. The National Gallery of Art notes that numerous works were lost during the occupation.
Much of the visual evidence for Pissarro's earliest development therefore disappeared before Impressionism had even officially begun.
Pontoise, northwest of Paris, became one of the defining places in Pissarro's career.
Here he painted roads, houses, hills, fields and workers over many years. It was close enough to Paris to remain connected to the capital but rural enough to provide the subjects that interested him.
More importantly, Pontoise became a kind of laboratory. Cézanne worked alongside him there. Gauguin visited. Guillaumin was part of the wider artistic circle.
The Musée d'Orsay notes that the evolution of Pissarro's painting during these years emerged both from his personal research into light and from artistic discussions among painters including Cézanne, Gauguin and Guillaumin.
Pissarro's importance therefore lies partly in his ability to create artistic communities. His career repeatedly involved exchange rather than isolation.
One of the most fascinating things about Pissarro is that he did not freeze his style after helping invent Impressionism.
By the 1880s, younger painters including Georges Seurat and Paul Signac were developing Neo-Impressionism. Instead of the loose, spontaneous-looking brushwork associated with Impressionism, they investigated optical theories of color and constructed pictures from small separated strokes or dots.
Pissarro was already in his mid-fifties. And he decided to try it.
Between the mid-1880s and around 1890, Pissarro experimented seriously with the new divided brushwork. The Musée d'Orsay identifies this as a distinct Neo-Impressionist episode in his career.
It was an extraordinary move. One of the founders of Impressionism was allowing artists a generation younger than himself to change the way he painted.
Eventually, Pissarro found the Pointillist method too restrictive for what he wanted to accomplish and returned to a freer technique. But he did not simply revert to his earlier style. His later paintings retain lessons about color and structured brushwork learned from Seurat and Signac.
This is why Pissarro occupies such an interesting position between Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.
Pissarro moved to Éragny-sur-Epte in 1884 and spent much of the remainder of his life there. He eventually bought the house in 1892. Gardens, fields, farm workers and the surrounding countryside provided him with an almost endless collection of subjects.
His family was central to life at Éragny.
Pissarro's partner and later wife, Julie Vellay, came from a Burgundy wine-growing family. Together they had eight children. The household was large, and money could be uncertain for many years while Pissarro struggled to sell enough paintings to support everyone.
Art nevertheless became something close to a family occupation.
The National Gallery records that Pissarro regarded Félix as perhaps the most naturally talented of his seven children who survived birth, six of whom became artists.
Among the best-known Camille Pissarro children who became painters were Lucien Pissarro, Georges Henri Manzana Pissarro, Félix Pissarro, Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro and Paul-Émile Pissarro. His daughter Jeanne, known as Cocotte, also made art.
Lucien became particularly important. He eventually settled in England and worked as a painter, printmaker and book designer, helping connect French Neo-Impressionism with British art and the Arts and Crafts world.
The Pissarro artistic dynasty continued into later generations.
Pissarro's Jewish background became particularly important during the political crisis surrounding Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish French army officer wrongly convicted of treason in 1894.
France became bitterly divided between defenders of Dreyfus and his opponents, and the affair exposed the depth of prejudice in French society.
Pissarro supported Dreyfus.
The controversy damaged some of his artistic friendships. The Ashmolean notes that Edgar Degas took the anti-Dreyfus side and ceased associating with Pissarro after 1894. Pissarro himself had already wondered whether prejudice surrounding his Jewish origins contributed to difficulties he experienced gaining acceptance.
This aspect of his biography complicates the familiar image of Impressionism as a peaceful world of sunlight and gardens. The artists belonged to a society divided by politics, class, nationalism and prejudice.
Pissarro was simultaneously a Caribbean-born outsider, a member of a Jewish family, an anarchist sympathizer and one of the central figures in French painting.
He consequently belongs among the most significant Jewish artists and Jewish painters of the nineteenth century.
Late in life, Pissarro underwent another surprising transformation.
An eye condition made prolonged painting outdoors increasingly difficult. Instead of giving up, he changed his working method. Pissarro began renting hotel rooms and apartments with good views and painting the modern city through their windows.
The result was one of the most celebrated periods in his career.
In 1897, Camille Pissarro painted Boulevard Montmartre repeatedly from an elevated hotel room. Rather than treating each canvas as an entirely different composition, he studied the same boulevard as weather, traffic, season and light changed.
He produced 14 views of the Boulevard Montmartre showing snow, rain, fog, morning, afternoon, sunset and other atmospheric effects.
Among them is The Boulevard Montmartre at Night, now in the National Gallery in London. Remarkably, the National Gallery identifies it as the only night painting Pissarro ever made.
Carriages stream along the road. Shopfronts glow. Pedestrians dissolve into tiny touches of paint. The elevated viewpoint turns the boulevard into something almost alive.
He went on to produce city series in Paris, Rouen, Dieppe and Le Havre.
The painter who had spent decades looking across fields now looked down from windows at the machinery of the modern city. The Pont du Carrousel, Afternoon, painted in 1903 from a third-floor room on the quai Voltaire, belongs to the last of those campaigns.
There is no single Camille Pissarro painting style because his technique changed repeatedly.
His early work reflects Corot, Courbet and nineteenth-century Realism. During the 1870s he adopted the broken brushwork, open-air painting and interest in changing light that characterize Impressionism. During the 1880s he experimented with Neo-Impressionist division of color. His mature work combined aspects of all of these approaches.
What remains consistent is his attention to observation.
Pissarro rarely depended upon theatrical subjects. A road could be enough. A vegetable garden could be enough. Two women talking in a field could be enough. What mattered was the relationship between color, light, weather, landscape and human activity.
That apparent simplicity is one reason his work can initially look quieter than Monet or Van Gogh.
It is also one of the reasons it rewards prolonged looking.
There is no universally agreed Camille Pissarro most famous painting, but several works and series have become particularly closely associated with him. These include The Boulevard Montmartre at Night (1897), The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning (1897), The Côte des Bœufs at L'Hermitage (1877), Two Young Peasant Women (1891–92), The Artist's Garden at Éragny (1898), Orchard in Bloom, Louveciennes (1872), Place du Carrousel, Paris (1900) and his numerous paintings of Pontoise.
Together, these Camille Pissarro famous paintings reveal the extraordinary breadth of his career: Caribbean and French landscapes, villages and fields, working people, gardens, experiments with Pointillism and finally crowded urban Paris.
His paintings now belong to virtually every major collection of nineteenth-century European art. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford holds what it describes as the world's largest collection of works by Pissarro.
Pissarro remained extraordinarily productive into his seventies.
The eye condition that restricted his ability to paint outdoors ultimately generated an entirely new body of work. From rented rooms he observed the Tuileries Gardens, the Louvre, the Seine and the traffic of Paris.
From an apartment at 28 Place Dauphine, he could look across the western end of the Île de la Cité toward the Seine and the Left Bank. These late pictures combine the immediate visual energy of Impressionism with decades of experience organizing complicated scenes.
Camille Pissarro died in Paris on 13 November 1903, aged 73.
By then the artistic rebellion he had spent decades defending had become one of the foundations of modern painting.
Pissarro's importance cannot be reduced to one masterpiece.
His greatest achievement may instead be the network of ideas and people surrounding him.
He learned from Corot and Courbet. He painted beside Monet. He encouraged Cézanne. He helped Gauguin. He collaborated with Degas in printmaking. He embraced the younger Seurat and Signac when their Neo-Impressionist experiments divided the older Impressionists. He taught his own children. And throughout that entire period, he continued altering his own work.
The Camille Pissarro paintings therefore trace nearly half a century of change in European painting.
He began before Impressionism existed. He helped create it. Then he helped the next generation move beyond it.
That is why father of Impressionism is more than a convenient nickname. Pissarro was one of the people who made the movement possible — artistically, intellectually and socially.
Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro is born on 10 July in Charlotte Amalie, Saint Thomas, in the Danish West Indies, to a Sephardic Jewish family running a general store.
Sent to boarding school at Passy, near Paris, where his drawing is encouraged. He returns to Saint Thomas as a teenager and is expected to join the family business.
Leaves Saint Thomas for Venezuela with the Danish painter Fritz Melbye, without his parents' permission, working around Caracas and La Guaira. Bridge at Caracas dates from 1854.
Settles in Paris in the year of the Exposition Universelle, and encounters the work of Corot and Courbet.
Attends the Académie Suisse, meeting Monet, Guillaumin and Cézanne. Exhibits at the Salon during the 1860s and at the Salon des Refusés in 1863.
The Franco-Prussian War drives the family to south London. He meets the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel and studies Constable and Turner. The house at Louveciennes is occupied and many early canvases are destroyed.
The first independent exhibition opens outside the Salon. Pissarro will show in all eight, from 1874 to 1886 — the only artist to do so.
Works beside Paul Cézanne around Pontoise and Auvers-sur-Oise, in an exchange that shapes both painters. Paul Gauguin, then a stockbroker, enters the circle as something like an unofficial pupil.
Moves to Éragny-sur-Epte, buying the house in 1892. Gardens, fields and farm workers supply his subjects for the rest of his life. Julie Vellay, from a Burgundy wine-growing family, runs a household of eight children on uncertain money.
In his mid-fifties, experiments seriously with the divided brushwork of Seurat and Signac, then returns to a freer technique while keeping what he learned about colour.
Paints Two Young Peasant Women, which the Metropolitan Museum connects directly to his anarchist sympathies and to an agrarian world being changed by industry.
The Dreyfus Affair divides France. Pissarro supports Dreyfus; Degas takes the other side and stops associating with him.
Paints fourteen views of the boulevard Montmartre from an elevated hotel room. One of them, The Boulevard Montmartre at Night, is the only night scene he is known to have painted.
Place du Carrousel, Paris. The eye condition has moved him indoors for good, and the late city series are painted through windows.
Paints his last Paris campaign from the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, then dies in Paris on 13 November, aged seventy-three.
Painting · in the catalogThe Pont du Carrousel, AfternoonSix of the seven children who survived birth become artists — Lucien, Georges Henri Manzana, Félix, Ludovic-Rodo, Paul-Émile, and Jeanne, known as Cocotte. The Ashmolean in Oxford now holds what it describes as the largest collection of Pissarro's work in the world.
The French rose breeder Delbard introduces a striped floribunda rose named for him — red, pink, yellow and white on the same flower.
Painting · The Neo-Impressionist years
Camille Pissarro painted this orchard at Éragny in 1888, entirely in small separate dots of colour. He was finishing it when he began writing to his son that he wanted a way of painting without the dot. The Dallas Museum of Art has had it since 1955.
Painting · The Paris window series
Camille Pissarro painted the avenue de l'Opéra in the winter of 1897 and 1898 from a room at the Grand Hôtel du Louvre. The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims says it is the only canvas of the series that stayed in France.
Painting · Louveciennes
Camille Pissarro painted this road into Voisins, a hamlet of Louveciennes west of Paris, in 1872, the year after he came back from London. It is at the Musée d'Orsay, part of the Ernest May donation of 1923.
Painting · Pontoise
Camille Pissarro painted this frost-covered field near Pontoise in 1873 and showed it at the first Impressionist exhibition in April 1874, where the critic Louis Leroy used it as his example of everything wrong with the new painting. It is at the Musée d'Orsay.
Painting · Early Pontoise landscapes
Camille Pissarro painted this cultivated hillside outside Pontoise in 1867 and sent it to the Paris Salon the following year, where the writer Émile Zola singled it out. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has held it since 1951.
Painting · Late series — Tuileries
Camille Pissarro painted the gardens beside the Louvre from a rented room on the rue de Rivoli in 1900. It is one of twenty-eight canvases he made of that view. German forces seized it in occupied France, Hermann Göring took it in 1941 and traded it away, and it was restituted after the war.
Painting · Late series — Rouen
Camille Pissarro painted this street in Rouen in 1898, on a Friday, when the market filled it. He painted the view three times and this is the only one of the three with the market under way. The Metropolitan Museum of Art bought it in 1960.
Painting · Portraits
Camille Pissarro painted himself in 1873, the year he turned forty-three, bald and heavily bearded in a dark coat, against a wall hung with pictures. His son gave it to the French state in 1930 and it is at the Musée d'Orsay.
Painting · Last works
Camille Pissarro painted himself in a hat and spectacles in 1903, the year he died at seventy-three. It is his last signed and dated self-portrait. His son Lucien Pissarro gave it to the Tate in London in 1931.
Painting · The boulevard Montmartre series
Camille Pissarro painted the boulevard Montmartre after dark from the same hotel window he used for the rest of the 1897 series. The National Gallery in London, which owns it, says it is the only night painting he made.
Painting · The boulevard Montmartre series
One of fourteen views of the boulevard Montmartre that Camille Pissarro painted from a single hotel window between February and April 1897. This is the grey one: bare trees, a damp road, and no shadows anywhere.
Painting · The Pontoise years
Camille Pissarro painted the wooded slope above his house at Pontoise in 1877, on a canvas almost twice the size he usually worked at. The National Gallery in London has had it since 1950.
Painting · The London year
Camille Pissarro painted Joseph Paxton's glass-and-iron Crystal Palace at Sydenham in south London in 1871, during the year his family spent in England as refugees from the Franco-Prussian War. The Art Institute of Chicago has held it since 1972.
Painting · The Neo-Impressionist years
Camille Pissarro painted eleven women gathering the grain left after the harvest, in the evening sun and in small dots of colour. The Kunstmuseum Basel held it on deposit from 1970 and was given it outright in 2021.
Painting · The Paris window series
Camille Pissarro painted the square outside the Gare Saint-Lazare from his window at the Hôtel Garnier, where he stayed for a few weeks early in 1893. It is one of the first Paris pictures he made from a rented room, four years before the boulevard Montmartre series.
Painting · Late series — Quai Voltaire
One of the last pictures Camille Pissarro painted. He worked it in 1903 from a hotel window on the quai Voltaire, looking downriver at the bridge, and was dead by November.
Painting · Late series — Place Dauphine
Camille Pissarro painted the Pont-Neuf in Paris from the window of a rented apartment on the Île de la Cité. This upright canvas of 1902, inventory number 205.B, belongs to the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. Three other 1902 paintings of the bridge, all separate pictures, are in Lyon, Cardiff and Hiroshima.
Painting · The Pontoise years
Camille Pissarro painted a corner of Pontoise in the winter of 1877, its red roofs seen through a screen of bare trees. Gustave Caillebotte owned it, and it reached the French national collections through his bequest in 1896. The Musée d'Orsay now catalogues it as Côte Saint-Denis à Pontoise.
Painting · Éragny — the late figure paintings
The largest canvas Camille Pissarro ever painted: two women resting at the edge of a field near his house at Éragny, begun in the summer of 1891 and finished in January 1892. It did not sell, and he gave it to his wife, Julie Vellay.
Painting · The figure paintings
Camille Pissarro painted a young woman drinking her morning coffee in 1881 and showed it at the seventh Impressionist exhibition the following spring. It has been in the Art Institute of Chicago since 1922.
Met · 1874
Named together by the Met among the founding members of the independent society whose 1874 exhibition named Impressionism. Pissarro showed in all eight of the group's exhibitions; Monet's Impression, Sunrise named the movement.
Married to
They were together for years against his family's wishes before marrying in London in 1871, during the Franco-Prussian exile. Eight children followed.
Mentored
He trained his son himself, and Lucien absorbed the divided brushwork at exactly the moment his father was experimenting with it. Lucien carried it to England in 1890 and founded the Eragny Press there.
Parent of
The eldest of the eight, born in Paris in 1863, and the one who took the family trade furthest.
Mentored
Gauguin was a stockbroker painting at weekends when Pissarro took him up in the 1870s, brought him into the Impressionist circle and taught him to work outdoors. The early landscapes and still lifes carry Pissarro and Cezanne openly.
Clashed with
They had worked together on printmaking. The Dreyfus Affair ended it: Pissarro supported Dreyfus, Degas took the other side, and after 1894 Degas stopped associating with him.
Mentored
They worked side by side around Pontoise and Auvers-sur-Oise through the 1870s. Pissarro moved Cezanne outdoors and away from the dark, dramatic painting of his early career; as Cezanne's structure tightened it came back the other way.
Met
They met in London in 1870-71, where both had gone to sit out the Franco-Prussian War. Durand-Ruel became the dealer who carried Impressionism commercially.
Met
Fellow exhibitor and the largest single presence in Caillebotte's collection: eighteen Pissarros by Anne Distel's count, seven of which the state accepted from the bequest in 1896. In May 1877 the two joined Renoir and Sisley in a forty-five-painting sale at the Hôtel Drouot — the sale where Caillebotte bought back his own Floor Scrapers.
Courbet supplied two things Pissarro kept: ordinary working people as a subject worth the largest canvas, and the example of showing outside the Salon when the Salon would not have you.
Pissarro reached Paris in 1855 and took Corot's observed landscape as his starting point, describing himself in early Salon catalogues as Corot's pupil.
Signac and Seurat built Neo-Impressionism out of colour theory, and Pissarro — a founder of Impressionism in his mid-fifties — took up their divided brushwork from the mid-1880s until about 1890.
The influence ran mostly the other way. Pissarro was in his mid-fifties when he took up the divided brushwork Seurat and Signac were developing, and he showed alongside them; what he gave back was the standing of a founding Impressionist willing to be taught.
Art movement · 1874–1886
The only painter in all eight of the group's exhibitions, and the one who brought Seurat and Signac into the last of them.
Camille Pissarro was a nineteenth-century painter and one of the founders of Impressionism. Born in Saint Thomas in 1830, he later settled in France and became known for landscapes, peasant scenes and city views. He was the only artist to participate in all eight Impressionist exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886.
Camille Pissarro was born in Charlotte Amalie on Saint Thomas on 10 July 1830. Saint Thomas was then part of the Danish West Indies and is now part of the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Yes. Pissarro was one of the founders and most important members of the Impressionist movement. He later experimented with Neo-Impressionism and Pointillism, particularly under the influence of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac.
There is no official single most famous Camille Pissarro painting, but The Boulevard Montmartre at Night of 1897 is among his best-known works. It belongs to a series of fourteen paintings Pissarro made of the boulevard Montmartre under different conditions and is the only night scene he is known to have painted.
Camille Pissarro and Julie Vellay had eight children. One died at birth. Of the seven surviving birth, six became artists, according to the National Gallery. The best-known painter children include Lucien, Georges Henri Manzana, Félix, Ludovic-Rodo and Paul-Émile Pissarro.
Yes. Pissarro lived and worked in Venezuela with the Danish painter Fritz Melbye during the early 1850s, particularly around Caracas and La Guaira. Among the surviving works from this period is Bridge at Caracas, dated 1854 and now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Yes. Pissarro was born into a Jewish family in the Danish West Indies. His Jewish origins became especially significant during the political climate surrounding the Dreyfus Affair in France. He supported Dreyfus, and the affair contributed to the collapse of his relationship with Edgar Degas.
Yes. During the 1880s Pissarro experimented with the Neo-Impressionist techniques associated with Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, using small separated strokes and dots of colour. He eventually abandoned strict Pointillism but retained elements of its colour theory and brushwork.
The correct spelling is Camille Pissarro, with two s's and two r's. Camille Pissaro, Pisarro and Pizarro artist are common search misspellings referring to the same painter.
The Camille Pissarro rose is not a painting. It is a multicoloured floribunda rose introduced by the French rose breeder Delbard in 1996 and named in honour of the Impressionist painter. Its striped flowers combine shades of red, pink, yellow and white.
Associated with · 1874–1886
The only painter in all eight of the group's exhibitions, and the one who brought Seurat and Signac into the last of them.
Met · 1874
Named together by the Met among the founding members of the independent society whose 1874 exhibition named Impressionism. Pissarro showed in all eight of the group's exhibitions; Monet's Impression, Sunrise named the movement.
Married to
They were together for years against his family's wishes before marrying in London in 1871, during the Franco-Prussian exile. Eight children followed.
Mentored
He trained his son himself, and Lucien absorbed the divided brushwork at exactly the moment his father was experimenting with it. Lucien carried it to England in 1890 and founded the Eragny Press there.
Mentored
Gauguin was a stockbroker painting at weekends when Pissarro took him up in the 1870s, brought him into the Impressionist circle and taught him to work outdoors. The early landscapes and still lifes carry Pissarro and Cezanne openly.
Clashed with
They had worked together on printmaking. The Dreyfus Affair ended it: Pissarro supported Dreyfus, Degas took the other side, and after 1894 Degas stopped associating with him.
Influenced
The influence ran mostly the other way. Pissarro was in his mid-fifties when he took up the divided brushwork Seurat and Signac were developing, and he showed alongside them; what he gave back was the standing of a founding Impressionist willing to be taught.
Mentored
They worked side by side around Pontoise and Auvers-sur-Oise through the 1870s. Pissarro moved Cezanne outdoors and away from the dark, dramatic painting of his early career; as Cezanne's structure tightened it came back the other way.
Met
They met in London in 1870-71, where both had gone to sit out the Franco-Prussian War. Durand-Ruel became the dealer who carried Impressionism commercially.
Influenced by
Courbet supplied two things Pissarro kept: ordinary working people as a subject worth the largest canvas, and the example of showing outside the Salon when the Salon would not have you.
Influenced by
Pissarro reached Paris in 1855 and took Corot's observed landscape as his starting point, describing himself in early Salon catalogues as Corot's pupil.
Parent of
The eldest of the eight, born in Paris in 1863, and the one who took the family trade furthest.
Influenced by
Signac and Seurat built Neo-Impressionism out of colour theory, and Pissarro — a founder of Impressionism in his mid-fifties — took up their divided brushwork from the mid-1880s until about 1890.
Met
Fellow exhibitor and the largest single presence in Caillebotte's collection: eighteen Pissarros by Anne Distel's count, seven of which the state accepted from the bequest in 1896. In May 1877 the two joined Renoir and Sisley in a forty-five-painting sale at the Hôtel Drouot — the sale where Caillebotte bought back his own Floor Scrapers.