Camille Pissarro
Camille Pissarro, born Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro, was a Danish-French artist who lived from 1830 to 1903. He was part of the Impressionism and Post-Impressionism art movements that swept through France in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Due to his gentle nature and helpful guidance, he was friends to so many of the budding and now world-renowned French artists of the late nineteenth century.
Born in the Caribbean Island of St. Thomas, which was then part of the Danish West Indies, Pissarro’s father sent him to a boarding school in France when he was 12 years old. It was during this time that he first got exposed to the great French masters. When he graduated school at 17 years old, his headmaster, Monsieur Savary, persuaded Pissarro that he must spend time and draw from nature after he returned back home to St. Thomas, which he did.
Pissarro’s father hoped that his son would follow in his footsteps and take over the family business, but while working for his father as a cargo clerk, Pissarro spent all of his free moments working on his art. When he turned 21 years old, Pissarro decided to pursue his art full time and spent two years painting in Venezuela which fellow Dutch artist, Fritz Melbye.
Pissarro moved to Paris in 1855. He enrolled in various classes at both the Académie Suisse and the École des Beaux-Arts where he studied both great masters and modern artists. In art school, he found the teaching methods stifling, and pursued his studies outside of school, most notably under the tutelage of French artist, Camille Corot. Corot inspired Pissarro to begin plein-air painting, which he did. But whereas Corot finalized his paintings in the studio, Pissarro would strive to finish his work outside in one sitting.
He started painting everything he saw the way that it was, without beautifying it. Critics of his day were not receptive to the colors Pissarro used or the fact that he depicted unpoetic landscape features in his art, such as dead trees and animal holes in the ground. Many people, including Paul Cézanne, actually credit Pissarro, and not Claude Monet, with inventing the Impressionism style of painting.
During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, Pissarro, unable to join the French army due to his Danish nationality, left France to stay in England. In 1871, he married Julie Vellay who was his mother’s maid. Unfortunately, upon returning to France after the end of the war, Pissarro found that only 40 or so of his 1,500 paintings that he created over a 20-year period remained. Heartbreakingly, the rest had been destroyed during the war by soldiers who were said to have used the paintings as mats for their wet and muddy boots.
After returning to France, Pissarro started the “Société Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs” in 1873, and was part of the very first Impressionist art show in 1874. In fact, he is the only artist to have had work exhibited at all 8 of the Impressionist art exhibits. However, by the 1880s, he was already beyond the Impressionist movement, opting instead to paint the daily lives of the common people, and moving into the neo-impressionism and post-impressionism world.
Towards the end of his life, Pissarro had a recurring infection in his eye and as he had to avoid the cold wind, could only paint outdoors in warm weather. In order to continue his work year-round, he rented hotel rooms on upper levels throughout Paris and would paint these grand birds-eye view landscapes that he could see just outside his window. This technique was a success for him, and Pissarro did this in multiple hotels throughout several cities. Pissarro died in 1903 at the age of 73.
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