Camille Pissarro: The Painter Who Never Missed a Show
Between 1874 and 1886, the Impressionists organized eight exhibitions of their own in Paris. The lineup changed from show to show. Camille Pissarro showed work in all eight. No other painter did.
Pissarro was born on 10 July 1830 on St. Thomas, then part of the Danish West Indies. At 12 he was sent to a boarding school outside Paris. Back on the island, he preferred sketching at the harbor. In 1852 he sailed to Venezuela with the Danish painter Fritz Melbye.
He settled in Paris in 1855, the year of the Universal Exposition. The landscapes of Camille Corot caught his eye there, and Corot became his teacher. A year later he signed Two Women Chatting by the Sea, St. Thomas with the words “Paris 1856.” It shows two women talking on a path by the sea on his home island.
In 1870 the Franco-Prussian War sent him to London. He left almost all of his paintings behind in his house in Louveciennes, near Paris. In south London he painted The Avenue, Sydenham, now at the National Gallery. By 1872 he was back in France, painting fruit trees in flower in Orchard in Bloom, Louveciennes.
The first exhibition opened in April 1874, in the former studio of the photographer Nadar. A week before the opening, Pissarro’s daughter Jeanne, called Minette, died. He took part anyway. He still believed the independent shows were the right way forward.
In the late 1870s and early 1880s he painted the fields around Pontoise and the people who worked them. Young Peasant Girls Resting in the Fields near Pontoise is signed and dated 1882. Later he settled in Eragny, where he painted his own garden in 1898.
In his last decade he turned to Paris. He hoped buyers would want views of the city, so he took a series of apartments overlooking the streets. From his windows he painted the boulevards at different times of day and in different seasons. The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning and Boulevard des Italiens, Morning, Sunlight both date from 1897.
He painted a final self-portrait in 1903, wearing a hat. That November he died in Paris, at 73. He is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery.
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Image credit:
National Gallery of Art, Washington; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The National Gallery, London; Tate, London; Musée d’Orsay, Paris. All public domain.
