Camille Pissarro, born on July 10, 1830, on the Danish Caribbean island of St Thomas, became a French painter of peasants, orchards and Paris boulevards seen from above. He died in Paris on November 13, 1903.
He was the only artist to show at all eight Impressionist exhibitions, the group shows held in Paris from 1874 to 1886 by painters who worked outdoors to catch the light. Cézanne and Gauguin both learned from him.
His life was harder than his quiet country scenes suggest. Pissarro went through decades of poverty, came home from a war to find his paintings destroyed, and lost some of his oldest friends.
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He was born in Charlotte Amalie, the capital of St Thomas and a busy trading port. His family were Sephardic Jews of Portuguese descent, from the Jewish communities first rooted in Spain and Portugal, and they ran a general store near the harbor.
Around the age of twelve he was sent to a boarding school at Passy, then a village on the edge of Paris, where a teacher told him to draw from nature.
He came home in 1847 and became a clerk in the family store. He filled the ledgers with sketches instead of sums.
In 1852 he left the store for good. Fritz Melbye, a Danish painter then living on St Thomas, had encouraged him to paint full time, and the two sailed together for Venezuela, across the Caribbean.
Caracas and Paris
In Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, Pissarro filled sketchbook after sketchbook. His parents, back on St Thomas, still counted on him to come home and run the store.
What You'll Discover
What a landscape painter advised him.
Who his mother would not accept.
What Prussian soldiers did to his canvases.
What Cézanne learned beside him.
Why he copied painters half his age.
Which friends turned their backs on him.