Biographie

1830–1903

Born in the Dan­ish West Indies, Camille Pis­sar­ro was a pio­neer of Impressionism.
Aged twen­ty-five, Pis­sar­ro decid­ed to pur­sue a career in paint­ing and set­tled in France. Here he met Claude Mon­et, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sis­ley and Frédéric Bazille, whose meet­ings at the leg­endary ‘Closerie des Lilas’ he joined. The group became known as ‘les intran­sigeants’, because their desire to invent a rev­o­lu­tion­ary way of paint­ing had led them to depict impres­sions, sen­sa­tions and light, whilst aban­don­ing the tra­di­tion­al stu­dio in favour of the so-called ‘plein-air’. Soon, con­tem­po­rary crit­ics named their prac­tice and style ‘Impres­sion­ism’.

Slight­ly old­er than the rest of the group, the man who went by the sobri­quet of ‘Le Père Pis­sar­ro’ (Father Pis­sar­ro) set­tled in 1866 in Pon­toise, on the banks of the riv­er Oise, from where he explored the sur­round­ing coun­try­side. Pissarro’s pres­ence made this area of nat­ur­al beau­ty into a haven for his fel­low Impres­sion­ists and their followers.
Pis­sar­ro par­tic­i­pat­ed in all land­mark exhi­bi­tions of the Impres­sion­ists held dur­ing 1874–1886. He gained recog­ni­tion as one of the major fig­ures of the move­ment. Con­tem­po­rary crit­ics rec­og­nized his enor­mous tal­ent and agreed that he was ‘with­out doubt the most naive and real­is­tic painter’ of the group.

Pissarro’s innate gen­eros­i­ty and adven­tur­ous spir­it led him to accom­pa­ny and sup­port the promis­ing Paul Cézanne; he also took in the young Paul Gau­guin who lived under his roof dur­ing the ear­ly 1880s. Pissarro’s encounter with the young painter Georges Seu­rat in 1885 guid­ed him to adopt the new style of Neo-Impres­sion­ism using the tech­nique of Divi­sion­ism (oth­er­wise known as Pointil­lism) How­ev­er, Pis­sar­ro found the sci­en­tif­ic analy­sis of the per­cep­tion of colour as the cor­ner­stone of Divi­sion­ism lack­ing in spon­tane­ity and returned to the free­doms of Impres­sion­ism. Sad­ly, Pissarro’s advanc­ing eye dis­ease forced him to give up ‘plein air’ paint­ing in 1890. Pis­sar­ro con­tin­ued to work on city views of Paris, Le Havre and Rouen, paint­ed from the win­dows of his hotel room or his apparte­ment on the Quai Voltaire in Paris, where he passed away on 13th Novem­ber 1903.