Camille Pissarro Prints

About Camille Pissarro

Camille Pissarro was born in July 1830 at Charlotte Amalie on Saint Thomas, then part of the Danish West Indies, to a family of merchants, and arrived in Paris in 1855 to paint. He studied at the Académie Suisse and was advised by Camille Corot, whose sober tonal landscapes shaped his early work. He painted at Louveciennes and, from 1872 to 1884, at Pontoise, where he taught Paul Cézanne to work outdoors and later took Paul Gauguin under his wing; he spent the Franco-Prussian War in south London, painting the suburbs of Norwood and Sydenham. Pissarro was the only painter to show at all eight Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886, and the one the others treated as an elder. In the mid-1880s he adopted the pointillist method of Seurat and Signac for about three years before returning to a freer touch. From 1884 he lived at Éragny-sur-Epte, and in 1897, with his eyesight troubling him, he painted the Boulevard Montmartre from a hotel window in a series that follows the street through morning, rain, carnival and night. He died in Paris in November 1903. Pissarro's cityscapes and fields have an unforced, workaday calm, and the Boulevard pictures in particular bring the lit, wet, crowded energy of Paris indoors.