Painter of Sephardic origin, he was born on a small island in the West Indies and as a young man emigrated to France. There he lived for many years in poverty, until toward the end of his life he became recognized as one of the outstanding landscape painters of his time. Having experienced misery himself, he often painted with warmth and sympathy peasants pushing wheelbarrows, digging potatoes, tending geese, or farm workers in coarse garments with backs bowed by labor and limbs gnarled by rheumatism. Pissarro had no spiritual links with Judaism though he was troubled by the rise of French antisemitism and the unjust condemnation of Captain Dreyfus.