Unknown author · Public domain

The only artist to show work at all eight Paris Impressionist exhibitions, and the one the others turned to as a steadying presence — Cézanne called him "a father... a little like the good Lord," and Pissarro mentored Gauguin and, later, Seurat when he took up Neo-Impressionism's pointillist technique in his fifties. Born on the Danish colonial island of Saint Thomas to a Jewish family, he moved to Paris and helped organize the 1874 group show that gave Impressionism its name, painting ordinary rural laborers and streets without idealizing them.