Camille Pissarro Biography Quotes 16 Report mistakes

Early Life
Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro was born on the island of St Thomas in the Danish West Indies on July 10, 1830, into a Sephardic Jewish merchant family. As a boy he was sent to France for schooling, where he drew steadily and discovered the museums and landscapes around Paris. Returning to St Thomas in his teens to work in his father's business, he soon realized commerce did not match his temperament. A decisive friendship with the Danish painter Fritz Melbye, who encouraged him to sketch outdoors and value direct observation, led Pissarro to spend several formative years in Venezuela, filling notebooks with studies of streets, markets, and tropical light. By the mid-1850s he resolved to become an artist and returned to France to pursue that path.

Formation in Paris
Arriving in Paris around 1855, Pissarro took classes at the Academie Suisse, studied from the model, and sought guidance from Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. Corot's example of painting directly from nature and his gentle, anti-academic counsel shaped Pissarro's early approach: modest motifs, truthful light, and sober harmonies. In the studios and informal academies of the city he befriended younger artists who would become central to Impressionism, including Claude Monet, Armand Guillaumin, and, soon after, Paul Cezanne. Pissarro worked on the outskirts of Paris, especially around Louveciennes and Pontoise, painting roads, orchards, and laborers at work. His commitment to painting en plein air and to depicting rural life without idealization distinguished him even before the Impressionist group coalesced.

War, London, and Durand-Ruel
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 upended his life. With Julie Vellay, whom he married during this period, and their growing family, Pissarro took refuge in London. There he renewed ties with Monet, studied the light-filled landscapes of Turner and Constable, and, crucially, met the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who would become the most steadfast champion of the Impressionists. When Pissarro returned to France, he found that occupying troops had destroyed much of the work left in his house. The loss deepened his resolve to keep working directly before nature and to seek new ways of showing his art outside the hostile Salon.

The Impressionist Circle
Pissarro helped organize the group that held its first independent exhibition in 1874 at the studio of the photographer Nadar. Alongside Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Cezanne, and others, he exhibited landscapes and scenes of rural labor that embodied the principles he had long practiced. He became a pivotal organizer, conciliator, and strategist within the group, often called the "dean" of the Impressionists for his seniority and even temper. He was the only artist to exhibit in all eight of the group's shows between 1874 and 1886. His influence extended to younger painters such as Paul Gauguin, whom he encouraged to work from nature and to simplify forms while honoring observed light.

Pontoise, Osny, and Eragny
From 1872 Pissarro based himself largely in Pontoise and nearby Osny, developing a rigorous practice of serial observation. He and Cezanne worked side by side for long stretches in the early 1870s, exchanging methods and sharpening each other's vision; Cezanne later credited Pissarro with teaching him how to see and to organize a landscape. Domestic life with Julie Vellay and their children centered around modest village homes and gardens, which became inexhaustible subjects. In 1884 the family settled in Eragny-sur-Epte, where orchards, fields, and village lanes provided material for decades. Durand-Ruel's periodic purchases and exhibitions helped sustain the household. Several of Pissarro's children pursued art, notably Lucien Pissarro, who later worked in England as a painter and wood engraver; Ludovic-Rodo, Georges Manzana, Felix, and Paul-Emile also became artists, each shaped by their father's example of disciplined observation.

Experiment and Neo-Impressionism
Driven by curiosity, Pissarro embraced new color theories in the mid-1880s under the influence of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. He adopted divisionist technique for a time, laying down small, separated touches of color intended to blend optically. At the eighth Impressionist exhibition in 1886, he presented these works, provoking mixed reactions from old allies. The method brought a cooler clarity to his landscapes and figure scenes, yet he never treated theory as dogma. By the early 1890s he loosened the system, synthesizing divisionist color with a freer brush, preserving his commitment to natural light and the rhythms of rural life.

Politics and the Dreyfus Era
Pissarro's ethics were as steady as his art. He sympathized with anarchist and libertarian ideas, befriending figures such as the geographer Elisee Reclus and the editor Jean Grave, to whose journal Les Temps nouveaux he contributed prints. During the Dreyfus Affair he openly supported Alfred Dreyfus and Emile Zola, a stance that strained friendships with some colleagues, notably Degas and, at times, Renoir. The episode revealed the moral backbone behind his quiet demeanor: a belief in justice, tolerance, and the dignity of ordinary people, the very subjects he painted with such care.

Urban Series and Late Style
Late in life a chronic eye inflammation limited Pissarro's ability to paint outdoors in cold or windy weather. He turned this constraint into an opportunity, renting rooms with broad windows that overlooked city squares, boulevards, and harbors. From these vantage points he created serial views of Parisian life, including the celebrated Boulevard Montmartre paintings of 1897, and sequences in Rouen, Dieppe, and Le Havre. These works applied his lifetime of observing light to the flux of urban modernity: shifting weather, traffic, and crowds recorded in variations across hours and seasons. Exhibitions at Durand-Ruel and, later, with dealers such as Ambroise Vollard broadened his audience as collectors began to recognize the scope of his achievement.

Final Years and Death
Pissarro continued to paint almost daily in Eragny and in the cities he visited, supported by his family and in close dialogue with fellow painters including Monet, Signac, and his own sons. He died in Paris on November 13, 1903. By then he had helped to found Impressionism, guided its younger members, tested its limits through Neo-Impressionist experiment, and returned to a supple, luminous style uniquely his own. His art of orchards, fields, workers, markets, and boulevards, and his role as the steady center of a volatile movement, left a durable imprint on modern painting.

Our collection contains 16 quotes who is written by Camille, under the main topics: Motivational - Wisdom - Art - Aging - Soulmate.

Other people realated to Camille: Mary Cassatt (Artist), Octave Mirbeau (Writer)