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CAMILLE PISSARRO
Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), the “Father of Impressionism,” was among the
most significant contributors to the movement and is remembered for
being universally championed by his contemporaries, both artists and critics
alike. His influence on the trajectory and development of Impressionism,
extending to myriad 20th century modern art movements is vast. Pissarro
trained with Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, was a student of and friend to
Claude Monet, a mentor and teacher to Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin,
and collaborated with Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac and the
Neo-Impressionists.
Pissarro was born on the island of St. Thomas (then the Danish West
Indies) to Jewish merchants of Portuguese and French ancestry. Frédéric
Pissarro, the artist’s father, caused an uproar among the island’s small
Jewish community when he married his uncle’s widow, a forbidden union
under Jewish law. Pissarro was sent to boarding school outside of Paris
when he was twelve years old. There he discovered his love of art, and he
continued to paint when he returned to St. Thomas at the age of
seventeen. He spent the next five years reluctantly working for his father’s
business before leaving for Venezuela, where he resided for the next two
years with the Danish artist Fritz Melbye. After this sojourn, he was
permitted by his family to return to Paris to pursue art full-time.
Pissarro’s early style was Realist, influenced mainly by Corot, Gustave
Courbet, and Jean-François Millet, and a number of his works were
accepted in the Paris Salons. At the same time he was frequenting the
Académie Suisse, where he met a group of younger, like-minded artists,
such as Monet and Cézanne, who were interested in breaking away from
the constraints of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The artists also convened
at the Café Guerbois in Paris, where they would meet to discuss art (in
conversations typically led by the elder artist Édouard Manet).
When the Franco-Prussian war broke out, Pissarro fled to London with his
family, where he met the famed art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel (also fleeing the
war). Durand-Ruel, an early champion of the Impressionists, began
purchasing and showing his works on a regular basis. The art dealer put
Pissarro in touch with Monet, also in London at the time in self-exile from the
war, and the two began spending considerable time together. They visited
museums and were particularly enamored with Joseph Mallord William
Turner and John Constable, and they painted
en plein air
regularly.
When the war ended, Pissarro returned to his house in Louveciennes to
find it had been looted by Prussian troops and all of his paintings were
destroyed or stolen. He decided to relocate to Pontoise, some twenty