Camille Pis­sar­ro is the Impres­sion­ist who doesn’t quite get the same props these days as the usu­al crowd: Mon­et, Manet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne et al. These names trip off the tongue, and jus­ti­fi­ably so due to the indeli­ble stamp they all made on the artis­tic endeav­our of Impres­sion­ism, but Pis­sar­ro was the one that they all looked up to as the old­est mem­ber and “founder” of their col­lec­tive group. It was Pis­sar­ro who real­ly helped get things off the ground and up and run­ning, so to speak, so let’s look at the inter­est­ing sto­ry of how that came to pass.

Pis­sar­ro was born in 1830 on the island of St Thomas in the Dan­ish West Indies (now US Vir­gin Islands). His father, a French nation­al of Por­tuguese Jew­ish descent, had trav­elled to St Thomas to deal with the estate of a deceased uncle. He end­ed up stay­ing, mar­ry­ing his uncle’s wid­ow and hav­ing four chil­dren with her. Accord­ing to Jew­ish law you can’t go mar­ry­ing your aunt so the fam­i­ly was ostracised, and the young Camille and his sib­lings were sent to school with the local indige­nous kids rather than to the island’s Jew­ish school.

At age twelve, Camille was sent to board­ing school in France, and returned to St Thomas with a love of art and a thor­ough ground­ing in draw­ing and paint­ing. After work­ing for this father for a few years, but being con­vinced by Dan­ish artist Fritz Mel­bye that he had a rare tal­ent, he left for Venezuela and took on paint­ing as a full-time pro­fes­sion. At twen­ty-one, he moved to Paris, work­ing as an assis­tant to Fritz’s broth­er Anton Mel­bye, and attend­ing the École des Beaux-Arts and Académie Suisse.

At the begin­ning of this peri­od Pissarro’s paint­ings were in accord with the stan­dards of the Salon, but he soon felt restrict­ed by those stan­dards. He want­ed to express the beau­ties of nature with­out adul­ter­ation. He began to leave the city and paint scenes in the coun­try­side, cap­tur­ing the dai­ly real­i­ty of vil­lage life, and paint­ing what he saw, with­out arti­fice or grandeur. This inevitably ruf­fled the feath­ers of the art world’s old guard who crit­i­cised his paint­ings as “vul­gar”.

At the Académie Suisse, how­ev­er, he met Mon­et and Cézanne, young artists whose own work was attract­ing sim­i­lar crit­i­cism, and he sym­pa­thised with them and encour­aged them. Even­tu­al­ly, oth­er Refusés (Salon rejects) joined the group and in 1873 Pis­sar­ro helped estab­lish a col­lec­tive called the “Société Anonyme des Artistes, Pein­tres, Sculp­teurs et Graveurs” which includ­ed fif­teen artists…and Impres­sion­ism was born. Let’s look at a gallery of Pis­sar­ro’s works, with promi­nence giv­en to his won­der­ful Jalais Hill, Pon­toise which marks his tran­si­tion into Impres­sion­ism.