51 Facts About Camille Pissarro

Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas.

Camille Pissarro later studied and worked alongside Georges Seurat and Paul Signac when he took on the Neo-Impressionist style at the age of 54.

Camille Pissarro is the only artist to have shown his work at all eight Paris Impressionist exhibitions, from 1874 to 1886.

Camille Pissarro "acted as a father figure not only to the Impressionists" but to all four of the major Post-Impressionists, Cezanne, Seurat, Gauguin, and van Gogh.

Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro was born on 10 July 1830 on the island of St Thomas to Frederick Abraham Gabriel Pissarro and Rachel Manzano-Pomie.

Camille Pissarro's father was of Portuguese Jewish descent and held French nationality.

Camille Pissarro's mother was from a French-Jewish family from the island of St Thomas.

Camille Pissarro's father was a merchant who came to the island from France to deal with the hardware store of a deceased uncle, Isaac Petit, and married his widow.

When Camille Pissarro was twelve his father sent him to boarding school in France.

Camille Pissarro studied at the Savary Academy in Passy near Paris.

Nevertheless, Camille Pissarro took every opportunity during those next five years at the job to practice drawing during breaks and after work.

Visual theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff claims that the young Camille Pissarro was inspired by the artworks of James Gay Sawkins, a British painter and geologist who lived in Charlotte Amalie, St Thomas circa 1847.

When Camille Pissarro turned twenty-one, Danish artist Fritz Melbye, then living on St Thomas, inspired him to take on painting as a full-time profession, becoming his teacher and friend.

Camille Pissarro then chose to leave his family and job and live in Venezuela, where he and Melbye spent the next two years working as artists in Caracas and La Guaira.

Camille Pissarro drew everything he could, including landscapes, village scenes, and numerous sketches, enough to fill up multiple sketchbooks.

In 1855, Camille Pissarro moved back to Paris where he began working as an assistant to Anton Melbye, Fritz Melbye's brother and a painter.

Camille Pissarro studied paintings by other artists whose style impressed him: Courbet, Charles-Francois Daubigny, Jean-Francois Millet, and Corot.

Camille Pissarro enrolled in various classes taught by masters, at schools such as Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Academie Suisse.

Camille Pissarro found Corot, along with the work of Gustave Courbet, to be "statements of pictorial truth," writes Rewald.

Camille Pissarro found the French countryside to be "picturesque," and worthy of being painted.

Camille Pissarro later explained the technique of painting outdoors to a student:.

Camille Pissarro preferred to finish his paintings outdoors, often at one sitting, which gave his work a more realistic feel.

In 1859, while attending the free school, the Academie Suisse, Camille Pissarro became friends with a number of younger artists who likewise chose to paint in the more realistic style.

Camille Pissarro agreed with the group about the importance of portraying individuals in natural settings, and expressed his dislike of any artifice or grandeur in his works, despite what the Salon demanded for its exhibits.

In subsequent Salon exhibits of 1865 and 1866, Camille Pissarro acknowledged his influences from Melbye and Corot, whom he listed as his masters in the catalogue.

At the age of thirty-eight, Camille Pissarro had begun to win himself a reputation as a landscapist to rival Corot and Daubigny.

Camille Pissarro kept in touch with the other artists of his earlier group, especially Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, and Frederic Bazille.

Camille Pissarro met the Paris art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, in London, who became the dealer who helped sell his art for most of his life.

Camille Pissarro's paintings began to take on a more spontaneous look, with loosely blended brushstrokes and areas of impasto, giving more depth to the work.

Camille Pissarro came back again in 1892, painting in Kew Gardens and Kew Green, and in 1897, when he produced several oils described as being of Bedford Park, Chiswick, but in fact all being of the nearby Stamford Brook area except for one of Bath Road, which runs from Stamford Brook along the south edge of Bedford Park.

When Camille Pissarro returned to his home in France after the war, he discovered that of the 1,500 paintings he had done over 20 years, which he was forced to leave behind when he moved to London, only 40 remained.

Camille Pissarro soon reestablished his friendships with the other Impressionist artists of his earlier group, including Cezanne, Monet, Manet, Renoir, and Degas.

Camille Pissarro now expressed his opinion to the group that he wanted an alternative to the Salon so their group could display their own unique styles.

Camille Pissarro created the group's first charter and became the "pivotal" figure in establishing and holding the group together.

One writer noted that with his prematurely grey beard, the forty-three-year-old Camille Pissarro was regarded as a "wise elder and father figure" by the group.

Camille Pissarro showed five of his paintings, all landscapes, at the exhibit, and again Emile Zola praised his art and that of the others.

However, this period marked the end of the Impressionist period due to Camille Pissarro's leaving the movement.

Camille Pissarro began painting with a more unified brushwork along with pure strokes of color.

Camille Pissarro then spent the years from 1885 to 1888 practising this more time-consuming and laborious technique, referred to as pointillism.

Lucien Camille Pissarro wrote that his father was impressed by Van Gogh's work and had "foreseen the power of this artist", who was 23 years younger.

Camille Pissarro eventually turned away from Neo-Impressionism, claiming its system was too artificial.

Camille Pissarro often chose hotel rooms on upper levels to get a broader view.

Camille Pissarro moved around northern France and painted from hotels in Rouen, Paris, Le Havre and Dieppe.

Camille Pissarro died in Paris on 13 November 1903 and was buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetery.

Camille Pissarro recalls that Cezanne walked a few miles to join Pissarro at various settings in Pontoise.

Art historian Diane Kelder notes that it was Camille Pissarro who introduced Gauguin, who was then a young stockbroker studying to become an artist, to Degas and Cezanne.

Several artworks by Camille Pissarro were looted from their Jewish owners in Germany, France and elsewhere by the Nazis.

Camille Pissarro's Shepherdess Bringing Home the Sheep was looted from the Jewish art collectors Yvonne et Raoul Meyer in France in 1941 and transited via Switzerland and New York before entering the Fred Jones Jr Museum at the University of Oklahoma.

Camille Pissarro's Picking Peas was looted from Jewish businessman Simon Bauer, in addition to 92 other artworks seized in 1943 by the Vichy collaborationist regime in France.

The grandson of Camille Pissarro, Hugues Claude Pissarro, was born in 1935 in the western section of Paris, Neuilly-sur-Seine, and began to draw and paint as a young child under his father's tutelage.

Camille Pissarro's work has been featured in exhibitions in Europe and the United States, and he was commissioned by the White House in 1959 to paint a portrait of US President Dwight Eisenhower.