Camille Pissarro

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Image:Pissarro.gardenatpont.750pix.jpg Camille Pissarro (July 10 1830 – November 13 1903) was a French impressionist painter.

Camille Jacob Pissarro was born in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas to Abraham Gabriel Pissarro, a Portuguese Sephardic Jew, and Rachel Manzano-Pomié, from the Dominican Republic. Pissarro lived in St. Thomas until age 12, when he went to a boarding school in Paris. He returned to St. Thomas where he drew in his free time. In 1852, he travelled to Venezuela with the Danish artist Fritz Melbye. In 1855, he moved to Paris, where he studied with the French landscape artist Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot.

Camille Pissarro married Julie Vellay, a maid of his mother's household. Julie was much younger than Pissarro when the two met. They would marry ten years later after their initial meeting. They had eight children together, one who died at birth, a daughter when nine and a son when an adult.

Known as the Father of Impressionism, he painted rural French life, particularly landscapes and workers in the fields as well as scenes from Montmartre. He then went to Paris to teach, where some of his students were Californian Impressionist Lucy Bacon , Paul Cezanne and Paul Gauguin.

His influence on the Impressionists is probably still underrated; not only were many of the ideas his own, but he also managed to remain on friendly, mutually respectful terms with such difficult personalities as Edgar Degas, Cézanne and Gauguin. Although generally seen as a minor Impressionist, Pissarro exhibited at all eight of the Impressionist exhibitions. Moreover, whereas Monet was the main practitioner of the Impressionist style, Pissarro may have been the main thinker in the development of Impressionist theory.

Probably the strength of Pissarro's mind got rather in the way of his painting as he felt the need to try out all new forms of painting as they came along, thus he painted in the Neo-Impressionist form between 1885 and 1890, before returning to a more pure Impressionism before the end of his life.

Image:Camille.jpg In March 1893, Paris Gallery Durand-Ruel organized a major exhibition of 46 of Pissarro's works along with 55 others by Antonio de La Gandara. But while the critics acclaimed Gandara, their appraisal of Pissarro's art was less enthusiastic.

Pissarro died in Éragny-sur-Epte on either November 12 or November 13, 1903 and was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

During his lifetime, Camille Pissarro sold few of his paintings. By 2005, however, some Pissarro paintings sold for around $4 million.

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