Orovida Camille Pissarro

Orovida Camille Pissarro (Epping, 1893 – London, 1968) was a British painter and printmaker, granddaughter of the Impressionist Camille Pissarro and daughter of Lucien Pissarro. Although she was born into a family of artists rooted in Impressionism, she moved away from that style and is remembered for works inspired mainly by Chinese, Japanese, Persian and Indian art.

Trained first by her father in oil painting, she later focused on printmaking, which offered commercial prospects such as illustration. She studied briefly with Walter Sickert in 1913. Around 1921 she exhibited jointly with the French painter Marie Laurencin, and a 1924 exhibition of Chinese painting at the British Museum deeply shaped her sensibility. Around the age of twenty she abandoned Impressionism, stopped using the Pissarro surname and developed a decorative, linear, stylised idiom with subjects such as tigers, horses, Mongol horsemen and Persian princes.

After her father's death in 1944 she returned to oil painting with a more naturalistic manner, drawing closer to the family tradition while keeping her Asian influences. She was a prolific printmaker. Her later subjects included portraits, members of the royal family and, above all, cats. After her death, memorial exhibitions were held at the Ashmolean Museum and at the Leicester Galleries, and her work is held in British and American collections.