Camille Pissarro was born in Saint-Thomas, Virgin Islands, on July 10, 1830 to a Jewish French father of Portuguese origin , and to a creole mother native of Danish Antilles. His father sent him to Paris, France from 1842 to 1847 to receive his early education at a boarding school in Passy, a small village near Paris. As early as that time, he spends his free time sketching the countryside and visiting Parisian museums. On return to Saint-Thomas, he forms a friendship with Danish painter Fritz Melbye, with whom he flees in 1852 to Caracas , Venezuela where he will stay two years, so as to avoid working in his father's business. In 1855 his father ends up yielding to his will to become a painter and sends him again to Paris, where the French branch of his family was going to give him financial support, in order to have him follow a more serious training. THE ACADEMY SUISSE.
At that time, he paints in the surroundings of Paris on the edges of the Seine, Oise and Marne rivers, his work being inspired particularly by the style of Corot, whose works he had admired during the World Fair of 1855, and with whom he gets in contact. It is from there that his vocation as a landscape painter was born. In 1859, he sent his first work to the official Salon and was admitted to expose there.
PONTOISE
At this time, his greater experience compared to that of Monet, Renoir and Sisley, confers his paintings a greater maturity. He uses color modulations to suggest space depth while keeping a great rigour in composition. These qualities which one also finds in the works of his pupil Cézanne make of Pissarro a painter much more considered today that he was in the past. In Pontoise, he works with Guillaumin, while frequently visiting Doctor Gachet in Auvers- Guillaumin, while frequently visiting Doctor Gachet in Auvers-on-Oise.
Pissaro-Cézanne
An important moment in painting history is the collaboration between Pissarro and Cézanne from spring 1872 until the end of May 1874.