Camille Pissarro's Introduction
Camille Pissarro was one of the most influential members of the French Impressionist movement and the only artist to participate in all eight of the Impressionist exhibitions.
Born on July 10th, 1830, in Saint Thomas in the Danish West Indies, Camille was sent to school in Paris where he displayed a talent for drawing. He returned again to Paris in 1855 having convinced his parents of his determination to pursue a career as an artist rather than work in the family import/export business. He studied at the Academie Suisse alongside Monet, and during this time also met C�zanne, Manet and Renoir.
The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 prompted Camille to move to England and, with Monet, he painted a series of landscapes around Norwood and Crystal Palace as well as studying English landscape painters in the museums. On returning home to Louveciennes at the end of the war a year later, Camille discovered that only 40 of his 1500 paintings - almost twenty years� work � remained undamaged.
In the summer of 1871 Camille settled in Pontoise where he was to remain for the next ten years, gathering a close circle of friends around him. C�zanne repeatedly came to stay with him and under Camille�s influence learned to study nature more patiently, even copying one of his landscapes in order to learn more completely his teacher�s technique.
These were also the years of the first Impressionist group exhibitions which were initiated by Monet, but in which Camille was to play a major role and which earned him much criticism for his art. While mainly interested in landscape, he liked to introduce people (generally peasants going about their rural occupations) and animals into these and they often became the focal point of the composition. It was this unsentimental and unliterary approach, and the complete absence of any pretence, that seemed to stop his work from finding appreciation with the general public.
One of the few collectors who did show interest in Camille�s work was a bank employee called Paul Gaugin who, after acquiring a small collection of Impressionist works, turned to Camille for advice when he decided to become a painter himself. For several years Gaugin closely followed his mentor and although their friendship was clouded by misunderstanding and disagreement, he still remembered Camille on his South Sea island and wrote shortly before his death in 1906: �He was one of my masters and I do not deny him�.
In the 1880�s Camille moved from Pontoise to nearby Osny, and then to Eragny, a small village much further from Paris. In 1885, at a time when he was dissatisfied with his work, he met both Signac and Seurat. He was fascinated by their attempts to replace the intuitive perceptions of the Impressionists with a scientific study of nature�s phenomena and by a �divisionist� technique based on optical laws, and despite the fact he had reached his middle fifties, he did not hesitate to follow the two young innovators. The following year he passed this new concept on to Vincent Van Gogh who had just arrived in Paris and was keen to learn of the most recent developments in art. However, after a few years Camille felt the restriction of Seurat�s theories and returned to his more spontaneous technique although retaining the lightness and purity of colour acquired during his divisionist phase.
In the last years of his life Camille divided his time between Paris, Rouen, Le Havre and his home in Eragny and painted several series of different aspects of the cities with varying light and weather effects. Many of these paintings are considered amongst his best and make a fitting finale to his long and eventful career.
When Camille Pissarro died in the autumn on 1903 he had finally started to gain public recognition and today, of course, his work can be found in many of the most important museums and collections throughout the world.
