Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro was born in 1830 on the island of St. Thomas in the Danish West Indies to a Sephardic Jewish family and moved to Paris in 1855, where he would become the only painter to exhibit in all eight Impressionist exhibitions — making him the movement’s most committed and consistent member. Older than most of his colleagues, he served as a mentor and father figure: Cézanne called him “humble and colossal,” and his generosity of spirit held the fractious group together through years of rejection and poverty.
Pissarro’s landscapes of the Île-de-France — the orchards, fields, and village streets around Pontoise and later Éragny — are among the purest expressions of the Impressionist vision: light-filled, honestly observed, free of sentimentality or dramatic effect. The Red Roofs (1877) captures the geometry of village houses through a screen of bare winter trees with a compositional intelligence that Cézanne admired and learned from. In the 1880s, Pissarro experimented with Seurat’s Pointillist technique before returning to a freer manner in his magnificent late series of Parisian boulevards, painted from hotel windows.
A committed anarchist, Pissarro believed that art and social justice were inseparable, and he contributed drawings to anarchist publications throughout his life. His influence as a teacher was immeasurable: Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh all learned from him, and his principled dedication to painting what he saw, as honestly as he could, remains a model of artistic integrity.