Scène de ferme (Farm Scene)
Camille Pissarro was born into a Jewish family on the island of St. Thomas (now part of the Virgin Islands) on 10 July 1830, which was home to a small Jewish community. In his early twenties, he travelled with a friend to Venezuela, where, to the disapproval of his parents, he began painting. He returned to St. Thomas in 1854 and moved to France the following year. There he enrolled at the Académie Suisse, meeting Monet, Cézanne, Manet and Renoir, who later became known as the Impressionists (Pissarro being the only artist of the group to exhibit at all eight of the Impressionist exhibitions in Paris between 1874 and 1886). Upon the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Pissarro and his family fled to London for a year, where he married his life partner, Julie Vellay. He made numerous studies and paintings of the outskirts of London and studied the English tradition of landscape painting while visiting galleries with his friend, Monet. Upon the family’s return to Pissarro's former home in Louvencielles, they discovered that most of his studio had been demolished during the war and relocated to the village of Pontoise. Pissarro was predominantly considered a landscapist, but also depicted workers, in keeping with his left-wing views. Upon his death in his Paris home in France on 12 November 1903, Pissarro was both celebrated as an Impressionist and revered by the Post-Impressionist generation. His works can be found in prominent private and public collections in the UK, most notably in Tate, The Courtauld, The National Gallery in London and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The influence of his year spent in London was explored in the recent exhibition 'Impressionists in London' at Tate Britain in 2017.
