by Shy Less

Created on: May 07, 2010

Camille Pissarro was born on Saint Thomas, an island which is part of the Virgin Islands. The Virgin Islands were a Danish colony until the year 1917. He kept his Danish nationality for the whole life. His father was a wealthy and successful trader. The family was originally French and Jewish. They had settled down on Saint Thomas a couple of years before he was born.

 
Camille Pissarro went to a boarding school in Paris. When he returned back to St. Thomas he came at the point and discovered that he was not interested in the family business. So, he was spending his time making paintings of the small harbor. In the year 1855, he left to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. He worked here for 2 years as a painter. In the year 1855 he settled down in France.
 
With the advice of Corot, whose land shapes he was really admiring, he went to paint in cities and villages around the locations of Paris. He made friends with Claude Monet and other impressionists.
 
Camille Pissarro was always busy finding new shapes and that was the reason he became one of the most refreshing impressionists. Pissarro was one of the first ones that started with separating colors. A great example is his painting "The Garden of Les Mathurins at Pontoise," which was painted in the year 1876. The sun lightened path was made out of blue, white, yellow and pink paint-brush lines (This style was called pointillism).  Pissarro was also an excellent drawer. A big part of his collection can be found at the Ashmolean museum in Oxford.
 
While Pissarro and Monet were staying in England (in the year 1870-1871) they got under the strong influence of Turner and Constable. This way he ended up with a complete impressionistic light-painting. Pissarro was the only one who took part to all eight exhibitions of the impressionists.
 
In the eighties, he joined a younger generation of artists. Amongst them were Georges Seurat, Paul Signac and his own son Lucien. In the nineties, he stopped with the style called neo-impressionism. He preferred a more flexible style to express his own way of the nature in an easier way. He also started to paint more townscapes. In his paintings of Paris, Rouen, Le Havre and Dieppe he expresses the changing effects of the light and the weather. He also expresses the dynamic of the modern city.
 
Pissarro stayed in Paris until his death in the year 1903. He died at the age of 73. He left behind a big collection of his art including 800 letters. These were sold by auction in the year 1975. His son Lucien lived from 1863 until 1944.

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