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Pissarro was the elder of the Impressionists, older than Monet or Degas, and the only one of the group to show in all eight of their exhibitions between 1874 and 1886. Younger painters treated him as a teacher. Cezanne said he was like a father to him, Gauguin studied under him, and his encouragement reached even Van Gogh.

The Franco-Prussian War caught him at his home in Louveciennes, a village west of Paris. He fled to London in 1870, and Prussian soldiers billeted in the house used his canvases as boards to cross the muddy garden and as aprons in the butchery they set up indoors. Of roughly 1,500 paintings from two decades of work, only about 40 came through. He returned and simply began again.

He stayed restless about method all his life. In 1885 he met the young Georges Seurat and took up his painstaking dotted technique, building pictures from tiny points of pure colour, before judging it too slow and drifting back to a looser Impressionist touch. In his 60s a chronic eye infection kept him from working outdoors, so he rented rooms above the boulevards of Paris and Rouen and painted the streets from the window, the same corners over and over as the light shifted through the day.