Camille Pissarro
(1830-1903)
 

Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas (now in the US Virgin Islands, but then in the Danish West Indies). His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Pissarro studied from great forerunners, including Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He later studied and worked alongside Georges Seurat and Paul Signac when he took on the Neo-Impressionist style at the age of 54.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Pissarro

The Road to Versailles, Louveciennes: Morning Frost
1871
Gouache on canvas
32 x 46 cm
Dallas Museum of Art
https://dma.org/art/collection/object/4360837

Pissarro was at the height of his powers in 1871, when he painted this compact and subtle study of morning light playing on a street near his home in Louveciennes. Unable to enlist in the French army during the Franco-Prussian War because of his Danish citizenship, Pissarro fled France at the end of 1870 and remained in exile in London until July 1871. When he returned to France, he found that his house had been ransacked by the German army and that many of his early paintings had been destroyed. Rather than being dissuaded by this setback, Pissarro commenced a campaign of landscapes representing Louveciennes that are among the greatest of his career. All the pictures benefit greatly from his time in England, not only because he was able to paint with fellow exiles Monet, Sisley, and Daubigny during that year, but also because he had studied the paintings, oil sketches, and watercolors by Constable and Turner in public collections in London. This injection of pictorial energy from earlier in the century was all that Pissarro needed to solidify his position as one of the most prominent landscape painters of the century.