Paulémile Pissarro (1884 – 1972) was born the youngest son of the illustrious Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, in Ergny-Bazincourt in 1884. As a young man, Paulémile studied with his father, often accompanying him to the sites where he and his contemporaries, including Claude Monet, Signac and Luce, would paint en plein-air. He eventually followed in his father’s footsteps as a landscape painter of the rustic scenes in Normandy and the Ile de-France.

When Camille Pissarro passed on in 1903, Paulémile was forced to give up his painting and take on a trade as an automobile mechanic. However, Claude Monet was appointed as his guardian and he encouraged him to pursue his love of painting. Consequently, Monet became his instructor for the next fourteen years. While painting under Monet’s tutelage, Paulémile had the good fortune to paint with Armand Guillaumin, Maurice Vlaminck and Segonzac.

In 1905, Paulémile moved to Paris and began to exhibit at the Salon des Independants. Like his father before him, Paulémile’s paintings are poetic, colorful, and spontaneous, and embrace the artist’s romantic vision of a beloved location. His paintings are also filled with effects of light playing upon all the different subject matter in his work. His short, vivacious strokes seem to create this effect of light, as well as an effect of motion. He tried to translate what he saw directly to the canvas, with what could be described as a form of visual shorthand. He gessoed each canvas with white, a practice started by his father, allowing the light to bounce off the white gesso and return to the viewer.

In 1924, Paulémile began to exhibit regularly at the Salon d’Automne in Paris and it was here that he continued to study and paint nature, and perfect his shimmering light effects.

In 1935, his son H. Claude was born, and Paulémile began to instill in him the magic of painting, and began what is now a third generation legacy in the world of Impressionist painters.