Still Life Apples and Pears in a Round Basket

Camille Pissarro was the only painter to exhibit in all eight Impressionist exhibitions, and he was the one holding the group together when it repeatedly threatened to fall apart. Cézanne and Gauguin both called him a teacher. He painted rural work first, peasants in fields around Pontoise and Louveciennes, then turned to city views late in life, taking rooms above Paris boulevards and painting the traffic below in series through changing weather. For several years in the 1880s he adopted Seurat’s pointillism, then abandoned it as too slow and too rigid. He was an anarchist by conviction, Jewish and born in the Danish West Indies, and the Franco-Prussian War destroyed most of his early work when troops occupied his house and used the canvases as flooring.