Camille Pissarro

Who is Camille Pissarro?

Camille Pissarro was born on July 10, 1830, in Charlotte Amalie on the island of St. Thomas, then part of the Danish West Indies and now the U.S. Virgin Islands, to a merchant family of Portuguese-Jewish descent. As a boy he sketched the harbor and street life of Charlotte Amalie, an early love of observation that shaped his later work. Sent to school in France at around age twelve, he returned to St. Thomas as a young man but soon left permanently for Europe to pursue painting, settling in France by the mid-1850s. There he became a central figure of the Impressionist movement, working alongside Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, and Edgar Degas, and was the only artist to exhibit at all eight Impressionist exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886. He later explored Neo-Impressionist pointillism and mentored younger painters including Cezanne and Paul Gauguin. Pissarro died in Paris in 1903. Charlotte Amalie today commemorates him with a small gallery near his birthplace on Dronningens Gade, honoring his roots in the islands.

Sources: Christopher Lloyd, Camille Pissarro (Rizzoli, 1981) · Ashmolean Museum / Pissarro Family biographical archive · Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Camille Pissarro"