The only painter at all eight Impressionist shows
Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), born on Danish Saint Thomas, is the sole artist to exhibit in every Paris Impressionist exhibition from 1874 to 1886. Cézanne called him a father; Rewald dubbed him the dean holding fifteen rebels together.
Pissarro was born in 1830 at Charlotte Amalie on Saint Thomas, then part of the Danish West Indies. His father, a merchant of Portuguese Jewish descent with French nationality, had come from France to run a late uncle’s hardware store and married the uncle’s widow, a match that scandalised the island’s small Jewish community. At twelve Camille was sent to the Savary Academy at Passy near Paris, where the headmaster grounded him in drawing and told him to sketch from nature once home.
Back on the island at 16 or 17, he spent five years as a port clerk in the family firm, drawing in every spare moment. At 21 the Danish painter Fritz Melbye persuaded him to make art his career, and the pair spent two years in Caracas and La Guaira in Venezuela, filling sketchbooks with landscapes and village life. In 1855 he returned to Paris, assisting Melbye’s brother Anton and studying Courbet, Millet, Daubigny and Corot.
Corot tutored him and inspired him to paint outdoors, though the two disagreed: Corot reworked pictures in the studio, while Pissarro liked to finish in the open air, often at a single sitting, and critics called his rutted lanes and scrubby mounds vulgar. At the Académie Suisse in 1859 he befriended Monet, Guillaumin and Cézanne. When the 1863 Salon turned the group down, Napoleon III set up the Salon des Refusés, and by 1868 Pissarro had stopped listing any masters in the catalogue, a declaration of independence Émile Zola praised.
In 1871 he married Julie Vellay in Croydon; six of their seven children became painters. He helped found a fifteen-member artists’ society in 1873 and became the only painter to show at all eight Impressionist exhibitions, from 1874 to 1886. John Rewald called him the dean of the Impressionists, Cézanne said he was like a father, and at 54 he took up the Neo-Impressionism of Seurat and Signac.
Source: Camille Pissarro
