Learn About Camille Pissarro in Art History, View His Art and Famous Paintings

"Railway Bridge at Pontoise”, Pissarro, 1873


Camille Pissarro, 1830-1903, one of Denmark’s (Virgin Islands) famous artists in art history was by membership an Impressionist and also a neo-impressionist intent on solidifying the more loose Impressionistic style. He came under the influence of Camille Corot arriving in France to study art previously apprenticed in the marts of trade. While living in Paris he found a kindred spirit and became good friends with Claude Monet even though Monet was ten years younger.

The public didn’t warm up to Impressionism from the beginning. Impressionism was a derisive word used by an art critic describing a new style of painting for which he had no affinity. Many of these artists later became famous history.

Considering one of Camille Pissarro’s more famous paintings “The Boulevard Montmartre, 1897, some of the detractors asked Pissarro “If I walk along the boulevard, do I look like this? Do I loose my legs, my eyes, and my nose and turn into a faceless blob?” The public until this time was used to a more traditional art with full attention paid to detail as Nature presented it.

As an Impressionist Camille Pissarro felt it was not necessary to define the boundaries of an object. The linear quality of a work destroys its essence and sensations. Giving advice to a younger painter, Pissarro instructed “choose a theme…work on the whole canvas at the same time, putting hues everywhere, in strokes of different colors and values, while observing what is next to them…One must paint freely and without hesitation, for it is best to set down one’s first impression.”

Camille Pissarro seems to have done just that when he painted another of his famous paintings in art history, ”Avenue de l’Opera”, 1898, reducing his paint to small juxtaposed dabs of paint suggesting figures and forms.

He had met Seurat and Signac in 1885 and became interested in Seurat’s pointillism or “Scientific Impressionism”, convinced that the systematic placement of small painted dots of paint would lead to greater luminosity. After painting in this art style for some time Pissarro finally abandon it going back to his earlier Impressionistic style stemming a tide of decreasing sales. Other famous artists of this art period are Edgar Degas and Auguste Renoir.
To view the gallery of Camille Pissarro paintings, click here.




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