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Pissarro an impression of this artist born on July 10, 1830 on the
Caribbean island of St. Thomas, Danish West Indies; to Abraham Gabriel
Pissarro, of Sephardic (or
 "Morrano") Jewish ancestry, and Rachel Manzano-Pomié, a Dominican of Spanish descent. The Pissarros operated a
dry goods store in what is now known as the Pissarro Building, 14
Dronnigens Gade in Queen's Quarter, Charlotte Amalie. Overlooking the
main street, the family's upstairs residence was a spacious apartment.
Large shuttered windows and high ceilings let breezes through during the
hot summer months.
 After
encountering the work of the English painters J. M. W. Turner and John
Constable while in London (1870-71), Pissarro lightened his palette and
formulated a technique of applying strokes of bright colour to the
canvas to create luminous effects. These experiments did not meet with
public or official approval, and Pissarro helped organize the first
independent impressionist show of 1874. Pissarro never abandoned an
underlying sense of solid form and contour. In such works as Peasant
Woman with a Wheelbarrow (1874; Nationalmuseum, Stockholm), freely
applied touches of broken colour and the play of light transform
ordinary settings with an atmosphere that softens and brightens forms
without dissolving them.
 In
the 1880s, Pissarro joined a younger generation of artists, including
Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, and his own son Lucien, in adopting the
Neo-Impressionist technique, which used the claims of science to support
a new style of painting. In common with many artists and writers of his
day, he became a fervent anarchist. He produced a powerful attack on
French bourgeois society in his album of anarchist drawings, Turpitudes
Sociales, 1889. Pissarro gradually abandoned Neo-Impressionism in the
1890s, preferring a more supple style that better enabled him to capture
his sensations of nature. While continuing to depict the landscape and
peasants at his rural home in Eragny, he also embarked on a new
adventure: cityscape painting. In his portrayals of Paris, Rouen, Le
Havre and Dieppe, he explored changing effects of light and weather,
while expressing the dynamism of the modern city.
Camille Pissarro was actively painting up until the end of his life. He
died in Paris in 1903, age 73.
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