In the early 1870s, an émigré painter watched from a railway footbridge as a steam engine left a station on London’s suburban fringe. His name was Camille Pissarro and he was developing a style of plein-air painting that would soon be called “Impressionism.”
Pissarro and a fellow émigré, Claude Monet, only stayed in London for a few months. By April 1874 they were among the painters holding the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris, the subject of a retrospective that runs until July 14 at the Musée d’Orsay and opens on Sept. 8 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.
Pissarro, a Danish citizen fleeing a Paris suburb during the Franco-Prussian War, was used to being an outsider. He had been born on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas to Jewish parents of French descent, and moved to Paris in 1855 after a few years in Caracas.
