Once in Paris, Pissarro (who changed to the more French spelling in 1882) studied with Corot and attended the Academie Suisse, where he met Claude Monet. He was then introduced to Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille and later to Paul Gauguin. He became a father figure, as well as a mentor, to Cézanne. He fell in love with Julie Vellay, a maid in his parents’ home. His family disapproved because of her social class and religion and never accepted her as a match.
In 1870 the Pissarros fled to London to avoid the Franco-Prussian War (with Rachel, now widowed, living close enough to see her grandchildren, to whom she was devoted). Camille and Julie wed there in 1871. Pissarro had asked for Rachel’s permission to wed—she wrote letters giving and then retracting her consent. When Camille and Julie returned to France, they found their house had been used as a slaughterhouse and was in ruins. Fifteen hundred of Pissarro’s paintings had been destroyed (several of Monet’s stored there were destroyed as well). Rachel continued to help support the family throughout her lifetime. In 1874 Pissarro’s beloved daughter Minette, of whom he painted several moving portraits, and who was named Jeanne-Rachel for her grandmothers, tragically died at the age of nine due to a respiratory infection. In all, Julie and Camille had eight children, two of whom died.
Rachel Monsanto Pomié Petit Pizzarro died in Paris in 1889, at the age of ninety-four. Toward the end of her life she was cared for by Julie, though she still refused to fully accept her as a daughter-in-law. It is interesting to note that when Julie’s oldest son decided to become an artist, Julie was said to react much as Rachel had when her son had the same desire, with displeasure and the hope he would find a more reasonable career. She knew how her husband and family had struggled financially, forced to depend on her mother-in-law. Her son did not listen to her and became a well-known painter.
Pissarro left his Jewish heritage behind, perhaps because of the stigma and stress placed on his parents and their family when they were ostracized from their community in St. Thomas. His mother warned him against being political when he thought of fighting in the Franco-Prussian War. “You are not French,” she is said to have told him. “Don’t do anything rash.”† But in 1894, during the Dreyfus Affair, Pissarro could no longer avoid the issue of his background. Captain Alfred Dreyfus was convicted by a military court of treason for allegedly passing French secrets to German intelligence. Evidence pointed to Dreyfus’s innocence, but France became divided into two camps—those who supported the military and those who wanted justice for the Jewish captain. Monet and Pissarro supported the search for the truth. Against Dreyfus were some of Pissarro’s oldest friends, including Cézanne, Degas, and Renoir. The affair became laced with anti-Semitism. When Emile Zola wrote his famous essay “J’Accuse” in 1898, anti-Jewish riots broke out. Pissarro wrote him a letter of admiration for this act of bravery. Degas and Renoir continued to shun Pissarro and did not attend his funeral.
Camille Pissarro’s childhood and school years spent with working people and the children of slaves formed his political and personal attitudes. As an outcast, he was sympathetic to those who were shunned by society. Pissarro thought of himself as an anarchist and an atheist and lived his life as an artist and a workingman, an outsider who did not let anything but his art define him. He never returned to the West Indies, but the island of St. Thomas and the people he knew there influenced his art, his philosophy, and his life. He died in Paris in November 1903, the same year the Louvre bought two of his paintings. He is considered to be one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.
† Rachel Pizzarro quoted in Private Lives of the Impressionists (New York: Harper, 2006), p. 78.