(b Charlotte Amalie, St Thomas, Virgin Islands, 10 July 1830; d Paris, 13 Nov. 1903). French painter, printmaker, and draughtsman, born in the West Indies, where his parents (a French-Jewish father and a Creole mother) ran a prosperous general store. He was educated at boarding school in Paris, but he then returned to the Caribbean and did not settle in France until 1855. Before this he had been mainly self-taught, but he now studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Suisse, as well as copying in the Louvre. In 1859 he met Monet, and with him became a central figure of Impressionism. Pissarro in fact was the only artist who participated in all eight Impressionist exhibitions and he was a much-respected father figure to his colleagues (he was about a decade older than most of the other members of the group).

Text source: The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford University Press)


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