Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro (* July 10, 1830 in Charlotte Amalie, Danish West Indies today: American Virgin Islands; † November 13, 1903 in Paris) was one of the most important and prolific French painters of French Impressionism. He is the progenitor of the Pissarro family of artists.
Camille Pissarro's Life
Elternhaus, Kindheit und Jugend
Camille's father, Abraham (Frederic) Gabriel Pissarro, came from a Marran family from Bragança in Portugal and had fled with his parents to Bordeaux as a child to escape the Inquisition.
There was a large community of Sephardic Jews in Bordeaux. Camille's mother, Rachel Manzano-Pomié, had Spanish ancestry and came from the Dominican Republic. In 1824, her father's family emigrated to the Antilles Islands.
In Charlotte Amalie, the capital of the Danish West Indies on St. Thomas, there was one of the first Jewish communities in the New World. There the father operated a hardware store.
The family continued to maintain strong ties with Bordeaux. At the age of twelve, Camille Pissarro was sent to a boarding school in a suburb of Paris.
He already showed great interest in drawing at this age, and his drawing teacher Auguste Savary, at the same time principal and founder of his school and a respected salon painter, encouraged Pissarro in this inclination.
Pissarro filled his notebooks with drawings of palm trees and plantations of his homeland.
In 1847, his father brought him back to the West Indies to introduce him to the family business. Pissarro, however, preferred to spend every spare minute at the harbor drawing.
There he met the Danish painter Fritz Melbye, who, despite being only four years old, was already an established painter who had exhibited several times in Copenhagen.
Melbye recognized Pissarro's talent and encouraged him. Despite his father's resistance, Pissarro joined Melbye when the latter traveled on to Venezuela in 1852.
Camille Pissarro's The young artist
In Caracas, Melbye and Pissarro rented a house together, and Pissarro sketched city life, the market and buildings, taverns, as well as rural life and vegetation in the area. In 1854 he returned to St. Thomas. Finally, he managed to convince his father to support him in his decision to devote life to painting.
In September 1855, he left St. Thomas for good and traveled to Paris. At the World's Fair there, he was able to admire nearly 5,000 works of painting, including paintings by Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and Camille Corot.
Pissarro became a student of Corot. He also sought out the painter Anton Melbye, the brother of Fritz Melbye. Urged by his father, he also took lessons from masters at the École des Beaux-Arts, but their dogmatic approach did not appeal to him.
Instead, he preferred to work in the circle of young colleagues who met in cafés to debate realism and outdoor painting. In 1858, he began to appropriate these themes, painting in the forests north of Paris. One of these paintings, Landscape at Montmorency, was accepted to the Salon of 1859, but did not receive much attention there.
In 1857, his parents moved back to France. Pissarro again lived with them in their house in Montmorency. In 1859 Julie Valley joined the parental household as a servant. Camille and she began an affair that produced two illegitimate children. In 1859, Pissarro met Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne at the Académie Suisse, a free painting school.
The middle years
In the mid-1860s, Pissarro began to break away from his teacher Corot and find his own style. In 1863, Pissarro showed paintings at the first Salon des Refusés and received honorable mention from critics.
In 1866 and 1868, two of his paintings were admitted to the Salon each year. The young critic Émile Zola liked them and praised them effusively. He particularly emphasized Pissarro's conscientiousness as an artist committed only to truth.
These successes with critics, however, did not mean successes with buyers and dealers. Pissarro fell into financial hardship and had to earn a living painting awnings and blinds.
Less well known is the social and political side of Pissarro: in his drawings he depicts the living conditions of poor people in realistic forms of expression, sometimes reminiscent of Daumier. He professed anarchism and became involved with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
In 1869 and 1870 he worked closely and regularly with his friends Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. They often set up their easels side by side and painted the same subjects together, though each maintained his own style.
In contrast to Monet, Pissarro included people and passers-by much more in his paintings: places, landscapes, and streets are almost always essentially co-determined by people working, talking to each other, or strolling.
In November 1870, he fled to London to escape the Franco-Prussian War, having previously housed his family in Brittany. He had to leave almost all his pictorial production behind in Louveciennes near Paris.
In London he met Monet again, who had also fled there before the war. The art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel became aware of him and bought four of his paintings from him, but in turn had no success in reselling them.
On June 14, 1871, in Croydon, south of London, Pissarro married his mistress Julie Vellay, who by then was pregnant with his third child. At the end of that month, he returned to France to find that some of his paintings had been trampled by German and French soldiers.
They had laid them out in the garden as a carpet to keep their boots from getting muddy. Pissarro was not discouraged by this, but worked more productively than ever in the years that followed.
He worked particularly intensively with Paul Cézanne; both influenced each other very strongly in their artistic development. Financially, he gained confidence when his paintings fetched high prices at an auction in January 1873, yet he had little income thereafter and was penniless again by the end of the same year.
In 1874 he was among the driving forces that organized the first Impressionist exhibition. The critical result was disappointing, and Pissarro's income from the exhibition was only 130 francs. In the 1870s, Pissarro struggled desperately to make sales and to make a sheer living for himself and his family.
Pissarro was a staunch advocate of exchange and collaboration between artists and participated in all subsequent Impressionist exhibitions until 1882.
The late years
In the mid-1880s he met the young artists Paul Signac and Georges Seurat. He became interested in their color theory and adapted their pointillist style of painting. He worked with pure, unmixed complementary colors, using them in shorter and shorter brushstrokes to achieve a blending of pure colors into an overall harmony.
In 1886, he exhibited with Signac, Seurat, and his son Lucien in a separate room at the Exhibition of Independents. Despite favorable reviews, he again failed to make a breakthrough with the buying public.
Over time, he also felt constrained by the procedural rules of Pointillism. In a letter to Signac in April 1887, he described himself as an adept of the new art, but by July of the same year he complained that it was too time-consuming for him. Around 1890, Pissarro turned back to "his" original, freer Impressionism.
In 1892 he finally achieved his breakthrough: with a major retrospective at his patron, the art dealer Durand-Ruel.
In the last ten years of his life he painted a series of cityscapes of Rouen, Dieppe and Paris. When he died in 1903, he left a huge number of paintings. Since 1980 there has been a Musée Camille Pissarro in Pontoise.
Pissarro's interest in anarchism
He also became involved with the ideas of anarchism, as did many Neo-Impressionists. He developed personal acquaintances with Émile Pouget, Louise Michel, and Jean Grave. After the assassination attempt by Caserio, Pissarro was sought by the police.
He fled to Belgium, where he met Élisée Reclus and Henry van de Velde. Pissarro had met van de Velde in Belgium in 1894. In March 1897, he wrote van de Velde a letter in which he explained his conversion to Neo-Impressionism and his departure from this painterly method.
After returning to France, he published in Les Temps nouveaux and became active against anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus Affair.
In 1889 he joined the debating club Club de l'Art Social and subscribed to anarchist newspapers such as Le Père Peinard, Le Révolté, Le Prolétaire, Les Temps nouveaux, which also published illustrations by him.
He also supported the newspapers, sometimes financially, and helped the families of persecuted or imprisoned anarchists. In his pen-and-ink cycle Turpitudes sociales (Social Outrages), Pissarro expressed his contempt for the exploitation of workers and for Parisian society.
Pissarro and the Dreyfus Affair
Pissarro's interest in the political and social consequences of the Dreyfus affair was the central theme of numerous letters to his son Lucien. On November 19, 1898, he wrote: "Yesterday, as I was going to Durand-Ruel's, at five o'clock, I got into the middle of a horde of high school students on the boulevards, with street boys running after them, shouting, "Death to the Jews! Down with Zola!" I walked right through the middle of the group to Rue Laffitte.
They didn't even think I was a Jew. Protests against the Dreyfus verdict hailed from all sides. The whole intelligentsia is protesting; and the Socialists are holding meetings."
"I heard [Armand] Guillaumin say that it would have been better for all of us if they had shot Dreyfus on the spot. And he is not the only one who thinks so," Pissarro wrote. " ... I hear it everywhere. No, I despair of our fellow citizens ..."
The division of his circle of colleagues and, in some cases, close friends in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair affected him deeply.
Above all, he was tormented by the rift with Edgar Degas, with whom he had been close friends. Pissarro, Monet, Signac and Vallotton, and especially the poet and critic Émile Zola ("J'Accuse...!"), supported Dreyfus.
On the opposing side were Degas, Cézanne, Renoir, and Armand Guillaumin. Anti-Jewish protests erupted throughout the country, and Zola was tried and convicted for libel. He was able to avoid imprisonment only by fleeing to England.
In the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, Pissarro left France again in 1894 for Belgium, but later returned to Paris.
Camille Pissarro's Works (selection)
Main article: Catalog raisonné of Camille Pissarro's works
In 1939, the catalog raisonné was published in Paris, listing 1316 oil paintings and several hundred other works.
In 2005, the Wildenstein Institute issued a new, more comprehensive catalog raisonné, now containing 1528 oil paintings, all from 1939, adding new discoveries and new insights into the artist's genesis.
Portrait of a Boy, 1852/55, Ordupgaard Art Museum, Copenhagen
Two Women Engrossed in Conversation by the Sea, St. Thomas, 1856, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
A square in La Roche-Guyon, 1867, National Gallery Berlin
View from Louveciennes, 1869-1870, National Gallery, London
Street in Sydenham, 1871, National Gallery, London
The Crystal Palace, London, Art Institute of Chicago
Portrait of Paul Cézanne, 1874, National Gallery, London
Jeanne-Rachel Pissarro, 1873-1874, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Madame Pissarro sewing at the window, 1873-1874, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Boats in Pointoise, 1876, Metropolitan Museum of Arts, New York
The Woodcutter, 1878, Musée d'Orsay
Washerwoman, 1880, Metropolitan Museum of Arts, New York
The Little Country Maid, 1882, National Gallery, London
Study of a peasant girl digging, 1882, private collection
La Charcutière, 1883, Tate Gallery, London
Cowherdess, Éragny, 1887, private collection
Poplars, Éragny, 1895, Metropolitan Museum of Arts, New York
Steamboats in Rouen, 1896, Metropolitan Museum of Arts, New York
Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning, 1897, Metropolitan Museum of Arts, New York
Boulevard Montmartre at night, 1897, National Gallery, London
Rue de l'Épicerie in Rouen, in sunlight, 1898, Metropolitan Museum of Arts, New York
The Tuileries on a winter afternoon, 1899, Metropolitan Museum of Arts, New York
The Gardener, 1899, Stuttgart State Gallery
The Louvre under Snow, 1902, National Gallery, London
Le Quai Malaquais et l'Institut, 1903, private collection
Le Pont de la Clef à Bruges, Belgique, 1903, Manchester Art Gallery
Today, up to 19 million pounds sterling are paid for the artist's works.
Joachim Pissarro, Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts: Pissarro : catalogue critique des peintures (3 volumes - volume 1 is in French, volumes 2 and 3 are bilingual French-English. On the title page of volumes 2 and 3 is the subtitle "critical catalogue of paintings". Vol. 1: Biography. Volumes 2 and 3: critical catalog of paintings). Wildenstein Institute (ed.), Skira, Paris 2005, ISBN 978-2-908063-14-1.