Charlotte-Amalie, Saint Thomas, Antilles, 1830-Paris, 1903

Born on the island of Saint Thomas in the Antilles to a wealthy family of Jewish origin, Pissarro moved to Paris at an early age to study. Against his parents' wishes, he decided to dedicate himself to art. After a few years spent in his native city working in the family business, followed by two years in Venezuela painting with the Danish artist Fritz Melbye, he returned to Paris in 1855.

In Paris Pissarro studied at the Académie Suisse, and in 1859 visited the Universal Exhibition where he was impressed by the paintings of Camille Corot and Eugène Delacroix. In the same year he met Monet, Renoir and Sisley and took part in a Salon for the first time. During the 1860s he continued to enter his works at the Salons but the rigid requirements of that institution soon came into conflict with Pissarro's own anarchist views, and from 1870 he no longer showed there. Apart from a brief period of experimentation in the mid-1880s with the Neo-Impressionist technique influenced by Georges Seurat, stylistically Pissarro's work always fell within the orbit of Impressionism. He strongly believed in the idea of the artists' co-operative and played an active role in the organisation of the Paris Impressionist group's activities. Pissarro was, in fact, the only one of the group to take part in all their exhibitions, held between 1874 and 1886.

In 1866 he moved to Pontoise, and from then on lived almost all of his life outside Paris where he was basically a painter of landscapes and rural scenes and one of the first artists to wholeheartedly embrace the practice of paintings outdoors. At the end of his life Pissarro began to lose his sight and was therefore obliged to move to the city. It was then that he began to paint from a window, capturing the changing activity of the street scenes below him in cities including Rouen and Paris. His idyllic and harmonious landscapes were replaced by a series of urban views in which this tireless observer left behind him an unprecedented vision of urban life.

Brettell, R. and Pissarro, J.: The Impressionist and the City: Pissarro's Series Paintings. Exhibition catalogue Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, and Royal Academy, London, 1992-1993.

Lloyd, C.: Camille Pissarro. Geneva, 1981.

Pissarro, J.: Camille Pissarro. New York, 1993.

Pissarro, L. R. and Venturi, L.: Camille Pissarro. Son art-Son oeuvre. Paris, 1939.


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