Jacob Camille Pissaro is a French impressionist and neo-impressionist painter and printmaker that lived between 1830 and 1903. He is known for popular landscape drawings like his View from Louveciennes (1869-70), Landscape with Farmhouses and Palm Trees, and the Jalais Hills displayed at impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886.
His life and artistry career left a legacy that had critics call him “real” and “naive” while producing pieces that are as humble, sincere, and ever-lasting as he was as a person. The French impressionist artist Pissarro influenced other famous artists like Paul Gauguin, a post-impressionist master, and Claude Monet, an impressionist, and forerunner of modernism.
To tell you all about painter Pissaro, we present a timeline from his childhood to his life in France and London, accompanied by a list of Camille Pissarro’s most famous paintings. So let’s get right in.
Childhood And Early Years (1830-1853)
Camille Pissaro was born on the Island of St. Thomas to the Jewish pair of Frederick Abraham Pissarro, a Portuguese, and Rachel Manzano-Pomié, a native of St. Thomas. Interestingly, his mother was previously married to his father’s uncle, making their union greatly frowned upon by the Jewish community.
Regardless, Camille was the third son and lived with his family atop one of their shops on the main street of St. Thomas. He was sent to Savary Academy, a boarding school in Passy, France, at the age of 12, where he developed his interest in French artistry and early skills in drawing and painting.
At 17 years old, Pissarro returned home and took a role in the family business as a clerk, which his father preferred. However, the painter longed for an art career, and after almost five years in the business, at 21, he left his home for Venezuela.
To his father’s dismay, Fritz Melbye, a Danish artist who also lived in St. Thomas prompted the conviction to move out and adopt art as a full-time obligation. Moving between Caracas and La Guaira, the two artists worked together for the next couple of years, during which Pissarro created sketches and finished pieces depicting landscapes and villages.
Influence from France, Camille Corot, and the Paris Salon (1854-1869)
After working alongside Fritz in Venezuela, Camille Pissarro moved to Paris to work as an apprentice under his brother, Anton Melbye. This is where he got acquainted with works from Corot and Jean-François Millet, giving him the necessary inclination.
Although Pissarro initially enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts and Académie Suisse, he left both to be eventually trained by Camille Corot. However, the ultimate deciding factor for his style was the standards set by the Paris Salon.
The Paris Salon was an exhibition event and marketplace for young artists to present their artworks, and Pissarro wasn’t going to be left out. However, after having his first artwork exhibited in 1859, Pissarro and friends from the Académie Suisse, Claude Monet, and Paul Cézanne, expressed displeasure with the standards of the Paris Salon, swerved away from them, and got their work rejected but displayed at the Salon des Refusés instead.
The artist then focused on the “Plein Air” style of Corot and Gustave Courbet, paintings depicting raw “pictorial truths” of nature. He had further exhibitions at the Salon in 1865 and 1866, and after his exhibition in 1868, he began to gain recognition as a natural landscape artist. Pissarro landscape drawings even competed against pieces from Corot.
London and Marriage (1870-1871)
The Franco-Prussian war between 1870 and 1871 had Pissarro flee France to Norwood, a Village close to London, England. His marriage with Julie Vellay, his mother’s maid, was held in Croydon in 1871, with the union blessed with seven children, most of whom became artists themselves.
Pissarro’s time in Norwood didn’t bring much success as his early form of impressionism wasn’t wholly embraced. So instead, he hired Paul Durand-Ruel as his London art dealer, recognized the uniqueness and purity of his work compared to other London artists, and infused Impasto into his works to give them a more detailed meaning.
One piece he created while in Norwood still stands out today. The Avenue, Sydenham, expresses a landscape view of St. Bartholomew’s Church and is currently displayed at the National Gallery in London.
Return To France and Impressionism (1872-1879)
Going back to France, Pissarro found almost all of his work destroyed by soldiers, with only 40 remaining. The artist then moved his family to Pontoise and Louveciennes, villages just outside Paris, which eventually served as inspirations to put what he learned from Jean-François Millet into use. His time here saw him create a lot of paintings depicting village life and scenes.
He returned to London a few times to create Pissarro landscape drawings. The artist established a base in France and contributed to the “Société Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs.” This was a separate Salon collective pioneered by him but founded alongside Cézanne, Monet, and a few other impressionist artists.
The first exhibition from the group was held in 1874, featuring works from 15 artists. Even though critics had a lot of negative things to say about the exhibits featuring “commonplace” depictions instead of revered images of holy and historical sites, the absence of grandeur differentiated Pissarro’s impressionist works from the rest.
Neo-Impressionism and Death (1880 – 1903)
Exhibitions in 1876 made impressionist works more recognized, but Pissarro decided to experiment with new themes and painting styles in the 1880s. He returned to creating pieces depicting the raw village lifestyle from his time in Venezuela. By citing the importance of realism over idealism, he showed his upper-class clients the pure lifestyle of the people living below them.
During his neo-impressionism era, he ventured into pointillism, a tedious style that earned him even more reverence from his fellow impressionists. Regardless of this, however, Pissarro returned to his early impressionist style, working through an eye infection he endured until his death in 1903.
Conclusion
Pissarro’s demise saw him put on a high pedestal by Cézanne and Mary Cassatt through subsequent memorial exhibitions and journals. Today, his works are spread across multiple museums in Canada, the UK, France, and the US.
Some other Pissarro landscape drawings created over his lifetime include Enfant tétant sa mère, drypoint, and aquatint displayed in the British Museum, Pont Boieldieu in Rouen at the Ontario Art Gallery, and the Hay Harvest of Eragny.