Camille Pissarro the Early Years
On July 10, 1830 Camille Pissarro was born in Charlotte Amalie, on the island of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands to parents of French and Jewish origin, Abraham Gabriel Pissaro, a Portuguese Sephardic Jew, and Rachel Manzano-Pomie, from the Dominican Republic. The family owned a prosperous import export business but Pissarro preferred to pursue the study of art instead of working in the family business. At the age of 12 Pissarro left St. Thomas and attended boarding school in Passy, a Paris suburb. After working at the family business for a short time Pissarro traveled to Venezuela with Danish painter, Fritz Melbye in 1852, and worked there as an artist for two years.
In October of 1855, Pissarro moved to Paris where he met a number of different artists. He studied at several academic institutions including the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts and at the Academie Suisse where the classes were free. At the Academie Suisse Pissarro studied with fellow artists and friends Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Alfred Sisley, Auguste Renoir, and Armand Guillaumin. These young artists were trying out new ways of painting that rejected the traditional methods of the past.
He studied under masters such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, and Charles Francois Daubigny. Camille Corot was one of Pissarro’s most significant teachers. Corot, whose landscapes Pissarro had admired at the World’s Fair, was influential in encouraging Pissarro to paint and sketch landscapes of village imagery of river towns near the Seine Oise, and Marne rivers. By the end of the 1860s Pissarro was being praised by the prominent art critic Emile Zola for his realistic landscape paintings. The support of the journalist helped Pissarro to build his art career.
Pissarro married Julie Vellay, a maid working in his mother’s house. The two had eight children, one of which died at birth and another, a daughter, died at the age of nine. The remaining six children all painted.
Pissarro and his family moved to Louveciennes in 1869 but during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 Pissarro left France and moved to London, England. During his time in England he studied the works of English landscape painters and met fellow exile Paul Durand Ruel, an art dealer. While in London Pissarro and Monet were influenced by the landscapes of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. Their landscapes helped Monet and Pissarro to develop the unique style that would be later known as Impressionism. Upon his return home to Louveciennes at the end of the war, Pissarro discovered that most of his some 1500 paintings had been destroyed or damaged by the Prussian soldiers.