Camille Pissarro gave the Impressionist movement something it could not have built without him. He was its spine. He was the only artist to exhibit in all eight Impressionist exhibitions. He mentored Cézanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh. He held the group together when ego and money and aesthetic disagreement threatened to scatter it. Cézanne called him humble and colossal. He was both.

The Kingmakers had more material to work with against Pissarro than against any of his peers. He was born in the Danish West Indies in 1830, the son of a French Sephardic Jewish father and a Creole mother. He was not what the French art establishment considered a natural heir to its traditions. He was Jewish. He was a colonial subject. He was an anarchist — not as affectation but as a genuine political commitment that showed up directly in his work, in the peasants and market workers and rural laborers he painted with the same gravity history painters reserved for emperors.

During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, he fled Paris for London. Prussian soldiers occupied his home. They used his stored canvases as floorboards and slaughterhouse mats. Hundreds of paintings. Gone. He came back and kept painting.

The Dreyfus Affair broke open in 1894. Pissarro, as a Jewish man in France, did not need to read the newspapers to understand what it meant. The anti-Semitism that had always been ambient in the critical establishment had a name now.

He died in 1903 at seventy-three. Remove him from the Impressionist story and the map falls apart. The Kingmakers knew that. They tried anyway.