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Works by Camille Pissarro
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Grow a righteous beard like Camille Pissarro and you’ll be the leader of the gang too.
Based on his picture it's pretty obvious Camille was a dude but for the longest time I thought he was a she. Camille is a girl name in America!
Camille’s father, Frederick, was Portuguese Jewish and his mother Rachel was Creole.
Frederick was in the Virgin Islands taking care of his deceased uncle's business affairs and ended up marrying Rachel, his now widowed aunt, effectively becoming his own uncle/nephew.
Pissarro started painting as a kid, but followed his father’s directions and worked on the docks while pursuing his artistic passions on the side. He was extremely prolific making some 1,200 works in 20 years. Unfortunately, due to the Franco-Prussian war he had to leave most of them behind in London. When he returned years later they had been destroyed (some by soldiers using them as doormats!!) leaving only about 40 canvases.
His nurturing disposition brought him a lot of friends. You could easily play 'six degrees of separation with Camille Pissarro' but everyone would be within the first degree. He hung out with Gustave Courbet, Claude Monet, Emile Zola, Paul Cézanne, Mary Cassatt, Georges Seurat, and Vincent van Gogh.
Pissarro married his mom's maid and had seven kids.
It’s hard to tell exactly which paintings are by Pissarro simply because he embraced every style he came across. He was open to trying new techniques and encouraged his friends/pupils to do the same. Sounds like a nice guy!
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Here is what Wikipedia says about Camille Pissarro
Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro (/pɪˈsɑːroʊ/ piss-AR-oh,
French: [kamij pisaʁo]; 10 July 1830 – 13 November 1903) was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas (now in the US Virgin Islands, but then in the Danish West Indies). His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Pissarro studied from great forerunners, including Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He later studied and worked alongside Georges Seurat and Paul Signac when he took on the Neo-Impressionist style at the age of 54.
In 1873 he helped establish a collective society of fifteen aspiring artists, becoming the "pivotal" figure in holding the group together and encouraging the other members. Art historian John Rewald called Pissarro the "dean of the Impressionist painters", not only because he was the oldest of the group, but also "by virtue of his wisdom and his balanced, kind, and warmhearted personality". Paul Cézanne said "he was a father for me. A man to consult and a little like the good Lord", and he was also one of Paul Gauguin's masters. Pierre-Auguste Renoir referred to his work as "revolutionary", through his artistic portrayals of the "common man", as Pissarro insisted on painting individuals in natural settings without "artifice or grandeur".
Pissarro is the only artist to have shown his work at all eight Paris Impressionist exhibitions, from 1874 to 1886. He "acted as a father figure not only to the Impressionists" but to all four of the major Post-Impressionists, Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin, and van Gogh.
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