Camille Pissarro: The Complete Story
Camille Pissarro was the steady heart of Impressionism, the one painter who showed at all eight of the group's exhibitions and who mentored half its stars. Older, generous and quietly radical, he painted humble fields, muddy roads and the boulevards of Paris, and held the whole fragile movement together when it kept threatening to fall apart.
He is the least flashy of the Impressionists and, in many ways, the most important. Without Pissarro the group might never have survived its first decade.
The father of the Impressionists
Pissarro was the only painter to take part in every one of the eight Impressionist shows. He mentored Cezanne, encouraged Gauguin, and gave advice to almost everyone in the circle, including the young Claude Monet. Calm and fair, he was the man the others trusted to keep the peace.
Painting the everyday
He had no taste for glamour. Pissarro painted peasants in the fields, village markets, frost on a country lane, working outdoors to catch the real weather. His landscapes give ordinary rural life the same dignity older painters reserved for saints and kings.
The painter who refused honors
Pissarro was a committed anarchist who believed in equality and dignity for working people, and he turned down official honors on principle. His politics were not a pose; they ran straight into his choice of subjects, the laborers and small farmers most painters ignored.
Paris from a window
Late in life, troubled by a chronic eye infection that made working outdoors hard, Pissarro rented hotel rooms and painted the streets below. The result was glorious: whole series of the Boulevard Montmartre and other Paris avenues, crowds and carriages seen from above in changing light and weather.
The fifteen hundred lost paintings
During the war of 1870 Pissarro fled to London with his family, leaving his home near Paris behind. When he returned, Prussian soldiers had used it as a barracks and destroyed around fifteen hundred of his paintings, wiping out nearly twenty years of work, some of it reportedly laid down as mats in the muddy garden. He simply started again.
Quick answers about Camille Pissarro
Who was Camille Pissarro? A founding Impressionist and mentor to many of the others.
When was he born? In 1830, on the Caribbean island of St Thomas.
When did he die? In Paris, in 1903.
What is he famous for? Impressionist landscapes and his Paris boulevard series.
Why does he matter so much? He held the Impressionist group together and taught its stars.
Where can I see his work? The Musee d'Orsay and major museums worldwide.
When Pissarro came home in 1871, about fifteen hundred of his canvases were gone, ruined by soldiers who never knew what they had trampled. He picked up his brushes and began the work again, which tells you most of what you need to know about the man who quietly carried Impressionism on his back.
All five of his sons became painters too. See Camille Pissarro and his painter children, the family dynasty that still paints today.