Camille Pissarro

Camille Pissarro was born at Charlotte Amalie on Saint Thomas, then the Danish West Indies, on 10 July 1830, to Frederick and Rachel Pissarro. At twelve he was sent to school in France, where his teacher Monsieur Savary grounded him in drawing and told him to take his subjects from nature itself.

Back home as a port clerk he met the Danish painter Fritz Melbye, gave up the family business, and passed two years as a working artist in Venezuela. In 1855, aged twenty-five, he moved back to Paris for good, working as an assistant to the Danish painter Anton Melbye, and at his early Salons he named Melbye and Corot as his masters in the catalogue; his first acceptance at the official Salon came in 1864.

He raised his family outside Paris, at Pontoise and then Louveciennes, painting village life, rivers, woods and people at work. When he came home after the Franco-Prussian war, which his Danish nationality had kept him out of, he found that of the roughly 1,500 canvases of twenty years left behind under the occupation, only some 40 had survived.

Of all the Impressionists, he alone exhibited at each of the eight Paris exhibitions the group held, from the first in 1874 to the last in 1886. The year before the first of them he helped found the artists' collective behind the shows, wrote its charter, and became what one writer called the "pivotal" figure of the group. Younger painters trusted him: Cézanne said of him that "he was a father for me", and he was a father figure to the major Post-Impressionists in turn, above all Cézanne, but Seurat, Gauguin and Van Gogh too.

He never stopped testing himself. Between about 1885 and 1888 he took up the dotted, systematic touch of the Neo-Impressionists around Seurat and Signac, then let it go again for a looser hand.

In 1884 he moved his household to Éragny-sur-Epte, a village near Gisors west of Paris, and stayed for the rest of his life, painting its orchards, fields and labourers season after season.

In old age a recurring eye infection meant he could not paint out of doors in cold weather, so he travelled and worked from hotel rooms in Rouen, Paris, Dieppe and Le Havre, watching streets, crowds and weather from above. He died in Paris on 13 November 1903, of sepsis following a prostate abscess, at seventy-three, and lies in Père Lachaise Cemetery.