A Jewish merchant family in the Caribbean
Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro was born on 10 July 1830 in Charlotte Amalie, on the island of St Thomas, then part of the Danish West Indies and now of the US Virgin Islands. His father, Frederick Abraham Gabriel Pissarro, was of Portuguese Jewish descent and held French nationality; he had come to the island from France to manage the hardware business of a deceased uncle, and married the uncle’s widow, Rachel Manzano-Pomié, who came from a French Jewish family on St Thomas.
The marriage scandalised the island’s small Jewish community, because Jewish law forbids a man to marry his aunt by marriage. The couple’s children were barred from the Jewish school and sent instead to a primary school whose pupils were black. Camille grew up between cultures: Jewish by birth, Danish by nationality, French by language, and familiar from childhood with a racially mixed colonial society that would later shape his sympathies.
Passy, the port office and Venezuela
At twelve he was sent to boarding school at the Savary Academy in Passy, near Paris, where the headmaster gave him a solid grounding in drawing and urged him to draw from nature when he went home. Back on St Thomas at sixteen or seventeen, he was put to work as a clerk in his father’s business, but he used every break and evening to draw.
When he was twenty-one, the Danish painter Fritz Melbye, then living on St Thomas, encouraged him to make art his profession. Pissarro left the family business and spent about two years with Melbye in Venezuela, working in Caracas and La Guaira and filling sketchbooks with landscapes, markets and village scenes. In 1855, at the age of twenty-five, he moved to Paris for good.
Corot, the Salon and the young rebels
In Paris he studied the work of Courbet, Daubigny, Millet and above all Camille Corot, who gave him advice and encouraged him to paint outdoors. He found the teaching at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Suisse stifling, but at the Académie Suisse he met younger painters who shared his dissatisfaction with academic convention: Claude Monet, Armand Guillaumin and the awkward young Paul Cézanne, whom he befriended when others mocked him.
His first painting was accepted by the official Salon in 1859. In 1863, when the Salon rejected so many artists that Napoleon III ordered a separate Salon des Refusés, Pissarro was among those shown there. Through the 1860s he painted the villages and fields around Paris without idealisation, which some critics found vulgar. Émile Zola disagreed, calling him in 1868 one of the three or four true painters of the day.
Love, war and the loss of twenty years’ work
Pissarro fell in love with Julie Vellay, a vineyard grower’s daughter who worked as a maid in his mother’s household. His mother never accepted the match, and the couple’s first son, Lucien, was born in 1863, years before they could marry. They eventually married in 1871, in Croydon, England, and had seven children, six of whom became painters.
When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, Pissarro, a Danish national who could not join the French army, took his family to Norwood on the edge of London. There he met the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who would sell his work for much of his life, and with Monet studied the landscapes of Constable and Turner. He returned to France to find that of some 1,500 paintings from twenty years of work that he had been forced to leave behind, only about forty survived; soldiers had destroyed the rest, often using canvases as mats in the mud.
The father of Impressionism
Settling at Pontoise, where he lived from 1872 to 1884, Pissarro became the pivotal figure in organising an alternative to the Salon. In 1873 he helped found the cooperative society of artists whose first exhibition, in 1874, gave Impressionism its name. Between 1874 and 1886 the group held eight exhibitions in Paris; Monet, Renoir and others dropped in and out, but Pissarro alone showed in every one. The art historian John Rewald called him the dean of the Impressionist painters, not only because he was the oldest but because of his wisdom and his balanced, kind and warm-hearted personality. Contemporaries rated his role highly: the critic Armand Silvestre called him basically the inventor of Impressionist painting. Later historians have tended to see Monet as the movement’s guiding force and Pissarro less as its man of ideas than as its good counsellor and peacemaker, the figure who kept a quarrelsome band of individualists exhibiting together for twelve years.
He was a born teacher. For years he and Cézanne painted side by side around Pontoise, and Cézanne later said that Pissarro had been a father to him, a man to consult and a little like the good Lord. He taught Paul Gauguin, then a young stockbroker, and introduced him to Degas and Cézanne; encouraged Mary Cassatt, and helped the young Vincent van Gogh. He was also among the most devoted printmakers of the group, experimenting with etching, lithography and monotype. In the late 1870s he, Degas and Cassatt planned a journal of original prints, a project that collapsed when Degas withdrew.
The restless experimenter
In 1884 the family settled at Éragny-sur-Epte, a village near Gisors, where Pissarro spent the rest of his life. The following year he met Georges Seurat and Paul Signac and, at fifty-four, took up their Neo-Impressionist method of building pictures from small dots of pure colour. At the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition in 1886 he showed his new pointillist work in a separate grouping alongside Seurat, Signac and his son Lucien. It was a remarkable act for an established painter: to become, in middle age, the pupil of men half his age.
Within a few years he found the dot too slow and constraining for the spontaneity of sensation that Impressionism prized, and returned to a freer touch. Money was always short. When the Éragny house came up for sale in 1892, his friend Monet lent him money to buy it, and Pissarro built a large studio in the barn by the garden. He also kept returning to England, painting central London in 1890, Kew Gardens and Kew Green in 1892, and views in west London in 1897. Like many of his circle he admired Japanese prints, writing to Lucien of their calm, grandeur and extraordinary unity. The Éragny years were the subject of a 2017 exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris.
Anarchist, Jew and Dreyfusard
Pissarro’s politics were radical. He subscribed to anarchist papers such as Le Révolté, corresponded with the anarchist theorist Jean Grave and in 1889 drew Turpitudes sociales, a cycle of caricatures attacking capitalism. He was a non-believer, and his Jewishness was a matter of origin rather than faith; in 1882 he joked in a letter that there was very little of the Hebrew in him. Others never let him forget it. That same year Renoir objected to exhibiting with the Israelite Pissarro, and in 1892 Renoir’s brother attacked him as a mercenary Jew.
The Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish army officer was falsely convicted of treason, turned these slights into a rupture. In 1896 Pissarro wrote in support of Bernard Lazare’s pamphlet on antisemitism; by late 1897 he was convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence, and in 1898 he added his name to the petition of intellectuals backing Émile Zola. His old friends Degas and Renoir, both anti-Dreyfusards, stopped greeting him in the street.
Paintings from a window
In old age a recurring eye infection prevented Pissarro from working outdoors except in warm weather. He adapted by painting from hotel windows, often on upper floors, producing the great urban series of his last decade: the bridges and docks of Rouen, the harbour at Le Havre, and the boulevards of Paris, including the Boulevard Montmartre seen at different times of day and in different weather. These views of crowds, traffic and light are among the most admired works of Impressionism.
He died in Paris on 13 November 1903, aged seventy-three, of blood poisoning from a prostate abscess, and was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery.
Legacy
Pissarro sold relatively little in his lifetime, but he left a vast body of work and a dynasty of artists. His son Lucien became a painter and printmaker in England, other sons and grandchildren painted, and his great-grandson Joachim Pissarro became a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His letters to Lucien, edited by John Rewald and published in English in 1943, remain a key source on how a working painter of his generation thought about light, colour, money, politics and family.
Some of them also carry the scars of the twentieth century. Paintings owned by Jewish collectors were seized, looted or sold under duress during the Nazi era, and works such as Le Boulevard de Montmartre, matinée de printemps, taken from the German Jewish collector Max Silberberg, who was murdered at Auschwitz, and A Square in La Roche-Guyon have since been restituted to the heirs of their Jewish owners. The Silberberg painting sold in 2014 for £19.9 million. Pissarro’s deeper legacy is the generous example he set: the patient, open-minded elder who held a quarrelsome movement together, taught its geniuses and never stopped learning himself.
Sources & further reading
Camille Pissarro, Wikipedia · Camille Pissarro and the Dreyfus Affair, Shapell Manuscript Foundation · Camille Pissarro, Wikiquote · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.