Camille Pissarro was born in Saint-Thomas, Virgin Islands, on July 10, 1830 to a Jewish French father (Abraham) of Portuguese origin, who had settled in this Danish colony of the West Indies a few years earlier, and to a creole mother named Rachel Manzano-Pomie native of Danish Antilles.

His father sent him to Paris, France from 1842 to 1847 to receive his early education at a boarding school in Passy, a small village near Paris. As early as that time, he spends his free time sketching the countryside and visiting Parisian museums.

On return to Saint-Thomas, he forms a friendship with Danish painter Fritz Melbye, with whom he flees in 1852 to Caracas , Venezuela where he will stay two years, so as to avoid working in his father's business.

In 1855 his father ends up yielding to his will to become a painter and sends him again to Paris, where the French branch of his family was going to give him financial support, in order to have him follow a more serious training.

Self-portrait
1873

Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Banks of Marne River at Chennevières
1864-65
National Gallery of Scotland

At that time, he paints in the surroundings of Paris on the edges of the Seine, Oise and Marne rivers, his work being inspired particularly by the style of Corot, whose works he had admired during the World Fair of 1855, and with whom he gets in contact. It is from there that his vocation as a landscape painter was born.

In 1859, he sent his first work to the official Salon and was admitted to expose there. In 1860, he lives with Julie Vellay, the daughter of a Burgundian wine grower, of whom he will have eight children .

Except for 1867, he was regularly accepted to the Salon, but these admissions did not bring him many sales, so that he will have during many years financial problems to support his large family .

At this time, his greater experience compared to that of Monet, Renoir and Sisley, confers his paintings a greater maturity. He uses color modulations to suggest space depth while keeping a great rigour in composition. These qualities which one also finds in the works of his pupil Cézanne make of Pissarro a painter much more considered today that he was in the past.

In Pontoise, he works with Guillaumin, while frequently visiting Doctor Gachet in Auvers-on-Oise.

Hoar frost
1873
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

An important moment in painting history is the collaboration between Pissarro and Cézanne from spring 1872 until the end of May 1874.

They knew each other since more than a decade, and Pissarro welcomes Cézanne who comes to work with him. This latter settles with his family, initially in Pontoise, then in Auvers-sur-Oise in 1873 in a housing provided by Dr. Gachet.

Their joint work will appear particularly fertile for both of them. Cézanne will adopt the manner of Impressionist painting while he strengthens Pissarro in his desire to carry out compositions built with an autonomous picturality .

Towards the end of 1882, Pissarro left Pontoise to settle in Osny , a village close to Pontoise, where he continued his work, sometimes in company of his friend Gauguin, who then belongs to his circle of disciples, as well as Guillaumin, and Cézanne who visits him from time to time.

From this time, his work evolves from simple to more diverse landscapes such as street scenes, market scenes with many characters, interiors with peasants. The landscape painter becomes also a painter of figures .

His pallet also moves towards more contrast in colors and smaller strokes. The weaving of pictorial surface is composed of particles of pigments of equal value.

In 1884, he settles in Eragny , close to the Epte river, where he will remain until his death.

Poultry market , Pontoise
1882
Norton Simon Foundation
Los Angeles

View from my window, Eragny
c. 1886-88
The Visitors of the Ashmolean Museum
Oxford

For a moment he will adopt small pointillism's irregular strokes, and will even exhibit with Seurat, Signac and his son Lucien Pissarro in 1886.

Until 1890, he will execute divisionist paintings on subjects such as cultivated landscapes, river views or peaceful scenes of country work, although preferring small strokes to the rigorous points of Seurat.

In his late works, Pissarro will grant to metropolitan views an interest hitherto only expressed by Monet and Caillebotte. He rents rooms in Paris, Rouen, Dieppe and Le Havre, from which he paints dynamic perspectives of boulevards, places, rivers and bridges. As for Monet, he paints alternatives and repetitions to fix different lights.

One should see in this new evolution, due partly to his eyes' disease and his desire to satisfy his now many purchasers, Pissarro's social and progressist vision, in which what seems ugly in industrial development as regard to established order, may paradoxically appear beautiful.

In these city views, one can see again his aptitude for space composition, with major perspectives traversed by circulation and framed by buildings and alleys of trees, the whole setting bathing in a harmonious city light.

The contribution of Pissarro to Impressionism is essential, by his work and his art which is one of the most representative and most brilliant Impressionist expression, as well as by the influence which he had on the other Impressionists.

Two of his pupils recognized until the end of their life the importance which the teaching of Pissarro had had for their art : Cezanne, whom he helped to paint more clearly in the Impressionist way and to seek form by means of colors, without any recourse to drawing, and Gauguin, of whom he supervised early works.

Cézanne, who would sometimes introduce himself as a pupil of Pissarro, will always keep a sincere affection towards Pissarro whom he named "the humble and colossal Pissaro" and of whom he will say "He was like a father for me. He was a man to be consulted and someone like God "