Camille Pissarro was born in St. Thomas in the West Indies, where his father was a prosperous merchant. The Pissarro family, French and Jewish in origin, had settled in the Danish colony of St. Thomas a few years earlier.
Pissarro was sent off to a boarding school near Paris to begin his early education. He returned to St. Thomas as a young man and to his father’s disappointment had little interest in the family business; he would spend his time sketching instead.
He left for Venezuela in 1852 with the Danish painter Fritz Melbye, and worked as an artist there for two years before once again returning to and settling in France in 1855.

Upon arrival in Paris he took in the World’s Fair where he met with the artist Corot, whose landscapes he had admired in the Fair’s large art section. Following the advice Corot had given him, Pissarro was soon painting and sketching in small towns and villages near Paris.
He formed friendships with Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, and other future members of the Impressionist group while out painting and attending studio lessons in Paris. By the late 1860s, his powerful realist landscapes were praised by the prominent critic Emile Zola and Pissarro became a key motivator in getting the first Impressionist Exhibition together in 1874. Pissarro was the only member of the group to exhibit in all eight Impressionist Exhibitions.

Pissarro was one of the most innovative of the Impressionists, always searching for new means to express himself and excelled in drawing as well as painting. He joined a group of younger artists in the later 1880’s including Georges Seurat, Paul Signac and his son Lucien and developed a Neo-Impressionist technique that used science to support the new style of painting.
Pissarro gradually abandoned Neo-Impressionism in the 1890s, preferring a more supple style that better enabled him to capture his vision of nature. While continuing to depict the landscape and peasants throughout the French countryside, he also embarked on a new undertaking: cityscape painting, Pissarro explored the changing effects of light and weather, while expressing the energy of the modern city.

Camille Pissarro, like most of the other Impressionists, did not have his work widely accepted until later on in his life and spent most of his days living in poverty. He was however always actively painting throughout and up until the end of his life. He died in Paris in 1903, age 73.