Camille Pissarro

Elder statesman of Impressionism — landscapes, peasants, and the boulevards of modern Paris. Pissarro was the only artist to show in all eight of the official Impressionist exhibitions, and acted as mentor to a generation: Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh all credited him as a teacher. Born on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas to a French-Jewish family, he carried an outsider's eye into the French countryside, painting agricultural workers with a dignity unusual for the period. In the 1880s he experimented briefly with Seurat's Pointillism before returning to a looser hand and a series of late, rain-streaked Paris cityscapes painted from upper-floor windows.