Without Camille Pissarro, there is no Impressionist movement, and he is rightfully known as “the father of Impressionism.”

Born in the West Indies, Pissarro found his passion for painting as a young man in Paris. By the age of 43, he had corralled a group of enthusiastic artists into a new collective known as the Impressionists, and for the next 40 years Pissarro acted as the driving force behind the Impressionist movement. Pissarro was a dedicated family man, generous with his advice, passionate about experimentation, well-read, socially aware, and an avowed anarchist. It was a dramatic path that Pissarro followed and, throughout it all, he wrote extensively to his family. It is through these intimate and revealing letters that this gripping film reveals Pissarro’s life and work.

With exclusive access to the most extensive archive of any Impressionist painter and to the first major Pissarro retrospective in four decades, this film explores the enthralling and hugely important biography of an extraordinary artist and was filmed on location in France, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and the Kunstmuseum in Basel.