Camille Pissarro

Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro (10 July 1830 – 13 November 1903) was a painter born on the island of Saint Thomas, then part of the Danish West Indies and now in the US Virgin Islands. Holding Danish-French nationality, he was a key figure in both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. His early influences included Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and at age 54 he adopted Neo-Impressionism, working alongside Georges Seurat and Paul Signac.

In 1873, Pissarro helped create a collective of fifteen emerging artists, acting as the central figure who kept the group together and encouraged its members. Art historian John Rewald called him the "dean of the Impressionist painters," citing not only his age but his wisdom, balanced nature, and warm personality. Paul Cézanne described him as "a father for me. A man to consult and a little like the good Lord," and he also served as a master to Paul Gauguin. Pierre-Auguste Renoir deemed his work "revolutionary" for its portrayals of ordinary people in natural settings, free from artifice or grandeur. Pissarro is the only artist to have exhibited in all eight Paris Impressionist shows, from 1874 to 1886, and he acted as a father figure not just to the Impressionists but also to the four major Post-Impressionists: Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh.

Pissarro was born to Frederick Abraham Gabriel Pissarro, a Portuguese Jewish merchant with French nationality, and Rachel Manzano-Pomié, from a French-Jewish family with Provençal roots. His father had come from France to manage a deceased uncle’s hardware store and married the widow, which caused controversy in St. Thomas’s Jewish community because Jewish law forbids marrying an aunt. As a result, Pissarro and his siblings were barred from the local Jewish school and attended an all-black primary school instead. His father’s will later split his estate equally between the synagogue and the Protestant church.

At age twelve, Pissarro was sent to boarding school in France, studying at the Savary Academy in Passy near Paris. There, Monsieur Savary gave him a strong foundation in drawing and painting, encouraging him to draw from nature upon returning to St. Thomas. After school, he returned to the island at sixteen or seventeen and worked as a port clerk in his father’s business, but he practiced drawing during breaks and after work for the next five years. Visual theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff suggests that the young Pissarro was inspired by British painter and geologist James Gay Sawkins, who lived in Charlotte Amalie around 1847. Pissarro may have attended Sawkins’s art classes and seen his paintings of Mitla, Mexico, and Mirzoeff argues that Sawkins’s work influenced Pissarro’s early drawings of the local African population, creating sketches for a "postslavery imagination."

At age twenty-one, Danish artist Fritz Melbye, then living on St. Thomas, inspired Pissarro to pursue painting full-time, becoming his teacher and friend. Pissarro left his family and job to live in Venezuela with Melbye for two years, working as an artist in Caracas and La Guaira, filling sketchbooks with landscapes, village scenes, and numerous drawings.

In 1855, at age 25, Pissarro moved to Paris and worked as an assistant to Anton Melbye, Fritz’s brother and also a painter. He studied works by Courbet, Charles-François Daubigny, Jean-François Millet, and Corot, and enrolled in classes at the École des Beaux-Arts and Académie Suisse, but found their teaching methods "stifling," according to Rewald. He then sought and received alternative instruction from Corot. His early paintings followed the standards of the Paris Salon, the official body whose annual exhibition was the main marketplace for young artists. In 1859, his first painting was accepted and exhibited. During this period, Corot’s influence was strong: both artists loved rural scenes painted from nature, and Corot inspired Pissarro to paint outdoors, or "plein air." Pissarro saw Corot and Courbet’s work as "statements of pictorial truth," Rewald notes.