Camille Pissarro (Kunst)

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Known as the “Father of Impressionism,” Camille Pissarro was born in 1830 on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. The young Pissarro was raised in the West Indies by his Creole mother and French father. At 12 years old, he was sent to a boarding school on the outskirts of Paris, and there he began his earliest explorations of the arts, setting the stage for a lifetime focused on “close observation” of nature and everyday life.

After returning to St. Thomas for a short-lived attempt at running the family business, Pissarro returned to France in 1855 and began his art studies in earnest. His earliest influences included great artists of the time, such as Corot, Courbet, and Daubigny. In 1872, Pissarro settled into the rural village of Pontoise, and over the next decade, he built a small artistic community there with friends like Gauguin and Cezanne visiting him for extended periods. In Pontoise, he observed agrarian and village life, themes continued to crop up in his work throughout his life, such as Marché à Pontoise (1895).

As the most senior member of the Impressionist group, Pissarro was instrumental in organizing the first Salon des Refusés in 1874, exhibiting the avant-garde art of the Impressionists that was not accepted (or not submitted) to the official Paris Salon. The Salon des Refusés was continued for eight years. The Salons included hugely influential works by Monet, Cezanne, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cassat, Gauguin, and many others—but notably, only Pissarro showed his work in all eight Refusés exhibitions. Indeed, Pissarro was a central force of the Impressionist movement, in part because of his long-lasting ties to so many avant-garde artists of the time, even including close ties with “difficult personalities” of Degas, Cezanne, and Gauguin.

Throughout his life, Pissarro was an active, innovative, and explorative artist. In the late 1880s, disenchanted with “romantic Impressionism,” he explored Neo-Impressionistic ideas, such as Pointillism. However, in his last decade, he turned back towards his “purer” Impressionist techniques. He was an active painter and printmaker until his death in 1903 at 73 years old. His legacy lived on through many generations through his teaching of master artists, such as Paul Cezanne and Paul Gauguin, as well as a continuing artistic family lineage, including Manzana, Paulemile, Claude and today, his great-granddaughter Lelia.
•Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
•Chateau Museum, Dieppe, France
•Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY
•Hermitage Museum, Leningrad, Russia
•Louvre, Paris, France
•Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
•Museum D’Orsay, Paris, France
•National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
•National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
•National Gallery, London, England
•National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, Japan
•Norton Simon, Pasadena, CA
•Tate Gallery, London, England
http://galeriemichael.com/artists/pissarro-camille/