Camille Pissarro

The only artist to show in all eight of the official Impressionist exhibitions from 1874 to 1886, and the movement's moral center — the figure around whom younger, more difficult personalities gathered and felt supported. Pissarro was born on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas to a French-Jewish father from Bordeaux and a Creole mother; his outsider's relationship to the French countryside he painted for most of his adult life gave his peasant scenes a careful attentiveness that others in the group rarely matched. He settled in the village of Pontoise and then Éragny, where he painted the agricultural rhythm of orchards, market gardens, kitchen gardens and working women with methodical dedication. His role as teacher was as significant as his role as painter. Cézanne, who credited him directly and called him 'the first Impressionist,' studied with him at Pontoise in the 1870s. Gauguin painted alongside him in the early 1880s. Van Gogh idolized him. In the mid-1880s Pissarro, always theoretically curious, experimented seriously with Seurat's Pointillism — the only established Impressionist to do so — before finding the technique too slow and mechanical for his temperament and returning to looser handling. His final decade, spent largely painting the boulevards and markets of Paris, Rouen and Dieppe from upper-floor hotel rooms, produced some of the freest, most atmospheric canvases of his career. He died in Paris in 1903 at seventy-three, having outlasted almost all his close contemporaries. His son Lucien, also a painter, continued the family tradition in England.