Portrait of Félix Pissarro 1881

Camille Pissarro

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Keywords: PortraitFélixPissarro

Work Overview

Portrait of Félix Pissarro
Camille Pissarro
Date: 1881
Style: Impressionism
Genre: portrait
Media: oil, canvas
Dimensions: 55.2 x 46.4 cm
Location: Tate Britain, London, UK
Bequeathed by Lucien Pissarro, the artist's son 1944


Félix-Camille (1874 - 1897), also known as Titi, was the third son of Camille and Julie Pissarro. This portrait, showing him at the age of seven, is one of several paintings and drawings of him by his father.


Before his premature death in London in 1897, Félix worked as a painter, engraver and caricaturist under the pseudonym Jean Roch.


Félix Pissarro (24 July 1874 – 29 November 1897), born in Pontoise, Paris, in the year of the first Impressionist exhibition, was a nineteenth-century French painter, etcher and caricaturist. Under the adopted pseudonym of Jean Roch,[1] also known as Titi in his family circle, he was the third son of the painter Camille and Julie Pissarro.[2]


Félix's works very early demonstrated great strength and originality. His father regarded him as the most promising of his sons[3] but before he was able to realise his full potential, he contracted tuberculosis and died in a sanatorium at 262 Kew Road, Kew (which is now in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames), at the age of 23.[3] He is buried in Richmond Cemetery.


This is a portrait of the artist's third son, aged seven. Unlike many other Impressionists, Camille Pissarro was concerned in his portraits to convey in a traditional manner something of the individual character of his sitters. Here he has captured his son in a pensive, as well as slightly bored or frustrated, attitude. His son went on to be a painter and engraver, but died at the age of only twenty-three from tuberculosis while living at Kew, London.