Camille Pissarro

Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro ( piss-AR-oh; French: [kamij pisaʁo]; 10 July 1830 – 13 November 1903) was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of Saint Thomas (now in the US Virgin Islands, but then in the Danish West Indies). His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Pissarro studied from great forerunners, including Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He later studied and worked alongside Georges Seurat and Paul Signac when he took on the Neo-Impressionist style at the age of 54.

In 1873 he helped establish a collective society of fifteen aspiring artists, becoming the "pivotal" figure in holding the group together and encouraging the other members. Art historian John Rewald called Pissarro the "dean of the Impressionist painters", not only because he was the oldest of the group, but also "by virtue of his wisdom and his balanced, kind, and warmhearted personality". Paul Cézanne said "he was a father for me. A man to consult and a little like the good Lord", and he was also one of Paul Gauguin's masters. Pierre-Auguste Renoir referred to his work as "revolutionary", through his artistic portrayals of the "common man", as Pissarro insisted on painting individuals in natural settings without "artifice or grandeur".

Pissarro is the only artist to have shown his work at all eight Paris Impressionist exhibitions, from 1874 to 1886. He "acted as a father figure not only to the Impressionists" but to all four of the major Post-Impressionists, Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin, and Van Gogh.

Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro was born on 10 July 1830 at Charlotte Amalie on the island of Saint Thomas to Frederick Abraham Gabriel Pissarro and Rachel Manzano-Pomié. His father was of Portuguese Jewish descent and held French nationality. His mother was from a French-Jewish family from St. Thomas with Provençal Jewish roots. His father was a merchant who came to the island from France to deal with the hardware store of a deceased uncle, Isaac Petit, and married his widow. The marriage caused a stir within St. Thomas's small Jewish community because she was previously married to Frederick's uncle and according to Jewish law, a man is forbidden to marry his aunt. As a result, his four children were barred from attending the local Jewish school, instead being sent to an all-black primary school. Upon his death, his will specified that his estate be split equally between the synagogue and St. Thomas' Protestant church.

When Pissarro was twelve his father sent him to boarding school in France. He studied at the Savary Academy in Passy near Paris. While a young student, he developed an early appreciation of the French art masters. Monsieur Savary himself gave him a strong grounding in drawing and painting and suggested he draw from nature when he returned to St. Thomas.

After his schooling, Pissarro returned to St. Thomas at the age of sixteen or seventeen, where his father had Pissarro work in his business as a port clerk. Nevertheless, Pissarro took every opportunity during the next five years at the job to practice drawing during breaks and after work.

Visual theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that the young Pissarro was inspired by the artworks of James Gay Sawkins, a British painter and geologist who lived in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas circa 1847. Pissarro may have attended art classes taught by Sawkins and seen Sawkins's paintings of Mitla, Mexico. Mirzoeff states, "A formal analysis suggests that [Sawkins's] work influenced the young Pissarro, who had just returned to the island from his school in France. Soon afterward, Pissarro began his own drawings of the local African population in apparent imitation of Sawkins", creating "sketches for a postslavery imagination".

When Pissarro turned twenty-one, Danish artist Fritz Melbye, then living on St. Thomas, inspired him to take on painting as a full-time profession, becoming his teacher and friend. Pissarro then chose to leave his family and job and live in Venezuela, where he and Melbye spent the next two years working as artists in Caracas and La Guaira. He drew everything he could, including landscapes, village scenes, and numerous sketches, enough to fill up multiple sketchbooks.

In 1855, at the age of 25, Pissarro opted to move back to Paris, where he began working as an assistant to Anton Melbye, Fritz Melbye's brother and also a painter. He also studied paintings by other artists whose style impressed him: Courbet, Charles-François Daubigny, Jean-François Millet, and Corot. He also enrolled in various classes taught by masters, at schools such as École des Beaux-Arts and Académie Suisse. But Pissarro eventually found their teaching methods "stifling", states art historian John Rewald. This prompted him to search for alternative instruction, which he requested and received from Corot.

His initial paintings were in accord with the standards at the time to be displayed at the Paris Salon, the official body whose academic traditions dictated the kind of art that was acceptable. The Salon's annual exhibition was essentially the only marketplace for young artists to gain exposure. As a result, Pissarro worked in the traditional and prescribed manner to satisfy the tastes of its official committee.

In 1859 his first painting was accepted and exhibited. His other paintings during that period were influenced by Camille Corot, who tutored him. He and Corot shared a love of rural scenes painted from nature. It was by Corot that Pissarro was inspired to paint outdoors, also called "plein air" painting. Pissarro found Corot, along with the work of Gustave Courbet, to be "statements of pictorial truth," writes Rewald. He discussed their work often. Jean-François Millet was another whose work he admired, especially his "sentimental renditions of rural life".

During this period Pissarro began to understand and appreciate the importance of expressing on canvas the beauties of nature without adulteration. After a year in Paris, he therefore began to leave the city and paint scenes in the countryside to capture the daily reality of village life. He found the French countryside to be "picturesque", and worthy of being painted. It was still mostly agricultural and sometimes called the "golden age of the peasantry". Pissarro later explained the technique of painting outdoors to a student:

"Work at the same time upon sky, water, branches, ground, keeping everything going on an equal basis and unceasingly rework until you have got it. Paint generously and unhesitatingly, for it is best not to lose the first impression."

Corot would complete his paintings back in his studio, often revising them according to his preconceptions. Pissarro, however, preferred to finish his paintings outdoors, often at one sitting, which gave his work a more realistic feel. As a result, his art was sometimes criticised as being "vulgar," because he painted what he saw: "rutted and edged hodgepodge of bushes, mounds of earth, and trees in various stages of development." According to one source, such details were equivalent to today's art showing garbage cans or beer bottles on the side of a street. This difference in style created disagreements between Pissarro and Corot.

In 1859, while attending the free school, the Académie Suisse, Pissarro became friends with a number of younger artists who likewise chose to paint in the more realistic style. Among them were Claude Monet, Armand Guillaumin and Paul Cézanne. What they shared in common was their dissatisfaction with the dictates of the Salon. Cézanne's work had been mocked at the time by the others in the school, and, writes Rewald, in his later years Cézanne "never forgot the sympathy and understanding with which Pissarro encouraged him." As a part of the group, Pissarro was comforted from knowing he was not alone, and that others similarly struggled with their art.

Pissarro agreed with the group about the importance of portraying individuals in natural settings, and expressed his dislike of any artifice or grandeur in his works, despite what the Salon demanded for its exhibits. In 1863 almost all of the group's paintings were rejected by the Salon, and French Emperor Napoleon III instead decided to place their paintings in a separate exhibit hall, the Salon des Refusés. However, only works of Pissarro and Cézanne were included, and the separate exhibit brought a hostile response from both the officials of the Salon and the public.

In 1864, Pissarro was accepted to the official Salon for the first time, and in subsequent Salon exhibits of 1865 and 1866, Pissarro acknowledged his influences from Melbye and Corot, whom he listed as his masters in the catalogue. In the exhibition of 1868, however, he no longer credited other artists as an influence, in effect declaring his independence as a painter. This was noted at the time by art critic and author Émile Zola, who offered his opinion:

"Camille Pissarro is one of the three or four true painters of this day ... I have rarely encountered a technique that is so sure."

Another writer tries to describe elements of Pissarro's style:

In 1871 in Croydon, England, he married his mother's maid, Julie Vellay (1838–1926), a vineyard grower's daughter, with whom he had seven children, six of whom would become painters: Lucien Pissarro (1863–1944), Georges Henri Manzana Pissarro (1871–1961), Félix Pissarro (1874–1897), Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro (1878–1952), Jeanne Bonin-Pissarro (1881–1948), and Paul-Émile Pissarro (1884–1972). They lived outside Paris in Pontoise and later in Louveciennes, both of which places inspired many of his paintings including scenes of village life, along with rivers, woods, and people at work. From 1884 they lived at Éragny-sur-Epte, where Pissarro lived for the remainder of his life. The house and its surrounding landscape became recurring subjects of his later work. He also kept in touch with the other artists of his earlier group, especially Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, and Frédéric Bazille.

Pissarro was involved in anarchist circles and held strong views of egalitarianism. Pissarro was a subscriber to the radical anarchist publication Le Révolté and was in consistent communication with leading anarchist theorizer Jean Grave as well as fellow anarchist artists such as Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross. His political philosophies also motivated some of his art. For instance, in 1889, Pissarro created an album of 30 drawings titled Turpitudes sociales, using a style of caricature and allegory to critique modern societal issues. The purpose of the album was political, Pissarro created the album as a gift for his niece aiming to solidify her anarchist tendencies.

After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, having only Danish nationality and being unable to join the army, he moved his family to Norwood, then a village on the edge of London. However, his style of painting, which was a forerunner of what was later called "Impressionism", did not do well. He wrote to his friend, Théodore Duret, that "my painting doesn't catch on, not at all ..."

Pissarro met the Paris art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, in London, who became the dealer who helped sell his art for most of his life. Durand-Ruel put him in touch with Monet who was likewise in London during this period. They both viewed the work of British landscape artists John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, which confirmed their belief that their style of open air painting gave the truest depiction of light and atmosphere, an effect that they felt could not be achieved in the studio alone. Pissarro's paintings also began to take on a more spontaneous look, with loosely blended brushstrokes and areas of impasto, giving more depth to the work.

Through the paintings Pissarro completed at this time, he records Sydenham and the Norwoods at a time when they were just recently connected by railways, but prior to the expansion of suburbia. One of the largest of these paintings is a view of St. Bartholomew's Church at Lawrie Park Avenue, commonly known as The Avenue, Sydenham, in the collection of the National Gallery in London. Twelve oil paintings date from his stay in Upper Norwood and are listed and illustrated in the catalogue raisonné prepared jointly by his fifth child Ludovic-Rodolphe Pissarro and Lionello Venturi and published in 1939. These paintings include Lower Norwood Under Snow, and Lordship Lane Station, views of The Crystal Palace relocated from Hyde Park, Dulwich College, Sydenham Hill, All Saints Church Upper Norwood, and a lost painting of St. Stephen's Church.

Returning to France, Pissarro lived in Pontoise from 1872 to 1884. In 1890 he again visited England and painted some ten scenes of central London. He came back again in 1892, painting in Kew Gardens and Kew Green, and also in 1897, when he produced several oils described as being of Bedford Park, Chiswick, but in fact all being of the nearby Stamford Brook area except for one of Bath Road, which runs from Stamford Brook along the south edge of Bedford Park.

When Pissarro returned to his home in France after the war, he discovered that of the 1,500 paintings he had done over 20 years, which he was forced to leave behind when he moved to London, only 40 remained. The rest had been damaged or destroyed by the soldiers, who often used them as floor mats outside in the mud to keep their boots clean. It is assumed that many of those lost were done in the Impressionist style he was then developing, thereby "documenting the birth of Impressionism." Armand Silvestre, a critic, went so far as to call Pissarro "basically the inventor of this [Impressionist] painting"; however, Pissarro's role in the Impressionist movement was "less that of the great man of ideas than that of the good counselor and appeaser ..." "Monet ... could be seen as the guiding force."

He soon reestablished his friendships with the other Impressionist artists of his earlier group, including Cézanne, Monet, Manet, Bacon, Renoir, and Degas. Pissarro now expressed his opinion to the group that he wanted an alternative to the Salon so their group could display their own unique styles.

To assist in that endeavour, in 1873 he helped establish a separate collective, called the "Société Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs," which included fifteen artists. Pissarro created the group's first charter and became the "pivotal" figure in establishing and holding the group together. One writer noted that with his prematurely grey beard, the forty-three-year-old Pissarro was regarded as a "wise elder and father figure" by the group. Yet he was able to work alongside the other artists on equal terms due to his youthful temperament and creativity. Another writer said of him that "he has unchanging spiritual youth and the look of an ancestor who remained a young man".

Pissarro showed five of his paintings, all landscapes, at the exhibit, and again Émile Zola praised his art and that of the others. In the Impressionist exhibit of 1876, however, art critic Albert Wolff complained in his review, "Try to make M. Pissarro understand that trees are not violet, that sky is not the color of fresh butter ..." Journalist and art critic Octave Mirbeau on the other hand, writes, "Camille Pissarro has been a revolutionary through the revitalized working methods with which he has endowed painting".

According to Rewald, Pissarro had taken on an attitude more simple and natural than the other artists. He writes:

"Rather than glorifying—consciously or not—the rugged existence of the peasants, he placed them without any 'pose' in their habitual surroundings, thus becoming an objective chronicler of one of the many facets of contemporary life."

In later years, Cézanne also recalled this period and referred to Pissarro as "the first Impressionist". In 1906, a few years after Pissarro's death, Cézanne, then 67 and a role model for the new generation of artists, paid Pissarro a debt of gratitude by having himself listed in an exhibition catalogue as "Paul Cézanne, pupil of Pissarro".

Pissarro, Degas, and American impressionist Mary Cassatt planned a journal of their original prints in the late 1870s, a project that nevertheless came to nothing when Degas withdrew. Art historian and the artist's great-grandson Joachim Pissarro notes that they "professed a passionate disdain for the Salons and refused to exhibit at them." Together they shared an "almost militant resolution" against the Salon, and through their later correspondences it is clear that their mutual admiration "was based on a kinship of ethical as well as aesthetic concerns".

Pissarro was also known to experiment with lithographs, woodblock engravings, and original techniques in multicolor etching and monotype. Art historian Cora Michael notes that "of the Impressionists, Pissarro was perhaps the one most devoted to printmaking and…approached prints from the point of view of an avant-garde artist." In the 1880s to early 1890s, Pissarro returned to his studio in Pontoise, where he worked with many different print mediums to produce works such as "Vegetable Market at Pontoise" and "The Road to Rouen: The Hills of Pontoise".

In April 1884, Pissarro and his family settled at Éragny-sur-Epte, a small village near Gisors, where he would live for the remainder of his life. Writing to his son Lucien on 1 March 1884, Pissarro described the house as "superb", with a garden and meadows, and expressed particular enthusiasm for the surrounding countryside.

The house, garden, orchard, meadows, agricultural workers and the countryside around Éragny became recurring subjects during the final nineteen years of Pissarro's career. He also repeatedly painted views across the Epte valley towards the neighbouring village of Bazincourt-sur-Epte. Museum research has identified several landscapes painted from viewpoints on the property and, later, from the studio created in the barn.

Shortly after settling at Éragny, Pissarro began to reconsider aspects of his Impressionist technique. In 1885 he came into close contact with Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, whose approach was based on the juxtaposition of small strokes or dots of relatively pure colour intended to blend optically when viewed from a distance.

Between about 1885 and 1888 Pissarro experimented extensively with this more systematic technique, later associated with Neo-Impressionism and Pointillism. Éragny and its rural surroundings supplied many of the subjects for these experiments, including harvests, peasants at work, gardens and village landscapes.

At the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886, Pissarro showed works influenced by the new method in a separate grouping alongside Seurat, Signac and his son Lucien. The marked change in his technique attracted considerable attention from contemporary critics. Art historian Joachim Pissarro later emphasized his willingness continually to revise his artistic position and accept new challenges.

Pissarro regarded Neo-Impressionism not as a rejection of Impressionism but as a possible continuation of its search for colour and light. His adoption of the new approach was nevertheless unusual among the older Impressionists and placed him in direct contact with a younger generation of artists.

His interest in rural labour also continued during these years. Rather than idealising peasant life, Pissarro repeatedly represented people working in fields, gardens and farmyards, subjects that had interested him since much earlier in his career.

By the end of the 1880s, Pissarro increasingly found the Neo-Impressionist method too restrictive. After several years of experimentation he abandoned the systematic division of colour, explaining that the method made it difficult for him to respond freely to changing effects of nature, movement and individual sensation.

He nevertheless retained lessons from the experiment, particularly a heightened attention to colour relationships and a more structured handling of the surface. His subsequent Éragny paintings combined these experiences with a freer manner of painting.

The years at Éragny therefore encompass both Pissarro's most sustained engagement with Neo-Impressionism and his eventual return to a more flexible personal style.

The Pissarros initially rented the Éragny property. When it was offered for sale in 1892, Pissarro sought financial assistance from his longtime friend Claude Monet, who lived nearby at Giverny. Monet agreed to make up to 15,000 francs available, helping Pissarro and his wife Julie acquire the house. Referring to their long friendship, Monet wrote, "We are old enough friends to do each other favors."

In 1893, Pissarro substantially altered the barn bordering the garden to create a large studio on its upper floor. His correspondence with Lucien documents the progress of the work in detail. The north wall was fitted with a large arched glazed opening approximately three metres wide, which Pissarro described as providing "beautiful light"; another opening faced west over the orchard and towards Bazincourt. Access to the upper floor was provided by a covered exterior staircase.

The elevated studio gave Pissarro new viewpoints over the orchard, meadows and Epte valley. Research by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art has linked a number of his later Éragny landscapes to views from these windows.

The French Ministry of Culture records that the property consisted of a house, barn and orchard. It describes the studio and house at Éragny as an important site in the history of Impressionism and identifies the property as a lieu de mémoire. The studio and garden were registered as a French Monument historique on 1 July 1998.

Éragny remained Pissarro's principal home until his death in 1903. The property and surrounding landscape continued to provide subjects throughout the 1890s and early 1900s, including the garden, orchard, haymaking, apple harvesting, village views and scenes of agricultural work.

Works produced during the Éragny years are now widely distributed among international museum and private collections. In 2017, the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris presented Pissarro in Eragny: Nature Regained, an exhibition devoted specifically to the final two decades of Pissarro's career. Curated by Richard Brettell and Joachim Pissarro, it brought together around one hundred paintings, drawings and prints made at Éragny between 1884 and 1903, together with family archives, from major museum and private collections worldwide.

Works from the Éragny period are held in collections including the Musée d'Orsay, the National Gallery, London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Ashmolean Museum, Ordrupgaard and the National Gallery of Canada.

In his older age Pissarro suffered from a recurring eye infection that prevented him from working outdoors except in warm weather. As a result of this limitation, he began painting outdoor scenes while sitting at the window of hotel rooms, often choosing hotel rooms on upper levels to get a broader view. He moved around northern France and painted from hotels in Rouen, Paris, Le Havre and Dieppe. On his visits to London, he would do the same.

Pissarro died in Paris, from sepsis caused by a prostate abscess, on 13 November 1903, at the age of 73 and was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery.

During the period Pissarro exhibited his works, art critic Armand Silvestre had called Pissarro the "most real and most naive member" of the Impressionist group. His work has also been described by art historian Diane Kelder as expressing "the same quiet dignity, sincerity, and durability that distinguished his person." She adds that "no member of the group did more to mediate the internecine disputes that threatened at times to break it apart, and no one was a more diligent proselytizer of the new painting."

According to Pissarro's son, Lucien, his father painted regularly with Cézanne beginning in 1872. He recalls that Cézanne walked a few miles to join Pissarro at various settings in Pontoise. While they shared ideas during their work, the younger Cézanne wanted to study the countryside through Pissarro's eyes, as he admired Pissarro's landscapes from the 1860s. Cézanne, although only nine years younger than Pissarro, said that "he was a father for me. A man to consult and a little like the good Lord."

Lucien Pissarro was taught painting by his father, and described him as a "splendid teacher, never imposing his personality on his pupil." Gauguin, who also studied under him, referred to Pissarro "as a force with which future artists would have to reckon". Art historian Diane Kelder notes that it was Pissarro who introduced Gauguin, who was then a young stockbroker studying to become an artist, to Degas and Cézanne. Gauguin, near the end of his career, wrote a letter to a friend in 1902, shortly before Pissarro's death:

"If we observe the totality of Pissarro's work, we find there, despite fluctuations, not only an extreme artistic will, never belied, but also an essentially intuitive, purebred art ... He was one of my masters and I do not deny him."

The American impressionist Mary Cassatt, who at one point lived in Paris to study art, and joined his Impressionist group, noted that he was "such a teacher that he could have taught the stones to draw correctly."