Camille Pissarro

Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) was born in the Virgin Islands, and did not arrive in Paris to study art until in his mid-twenties. He studied at the Beaux-Arts and met Corot, Monet and Manet. A country man at heart, Pissarro settled with his family at Louveciennes in 1866 before fleeing to England in 1871 to escape the German invasion. On returning, he found that more than a thousand paintings had been destroyed. He moved to Pontoise, where Cezanne joined him for a time, and where later Gauguin came to work. Pissarro's impressionist work was followed for a time by pointillism, but he returned to his earlier style for the last decade of his life.