If you stumbled into a meeting of French Impressionist painters in the mid-1870s, you’d get some frosty looks. Edgar Degas would eye your clothes. Paul Cézanne, born suspicious, would scowl. Claude Monet might size you up for a sale.
Then a slightly older man with a rabbinical beard and a gaucho hat would step forward and hold out his hand: “Camille Pissarro. Join us, please.”
He’d introduce you around, settle you down and bring the talk back to where he usually left it, a continuing conversation about art, life and revolution.
Pissarro was, by temperament and belief, a welcomer — of people, ideas. And there’s an embracing feel to “Pissarro’s People” at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute here, a modest, openhearted show that demonstrates how central a role human presence played in the work of an artist usually associated with landscape painting.
More than many of his colleagues, Pissarro understood what it felt like to come from outside, uncertain of the rules. He was born thousands of miles away from Europe in 1830, on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, then a Danish colony. His father was a dry-goods merchant from Bordeaux, his mother a Caribbean-born daughter of French parents. Both sides of the family were Sephardic Jews. Pissarro himself chose to remain a Danish citizen all his life.
Even on St. Thomas his status was outside the norm. His parents were unmarried when he was born, bringing censure from Jews on the island. As a child he went to a local Moravian school with Afro-Caribbean children, where he spoke English instead of French.
After being sent to a school near Paris for a few years to be Europeanized, he returned to St. Thomas in 1847, ostensibly to join the family business. But by then he had other plans: He had decided to be an artist. And he already was one, painting and drawing the island life around him. He eventually hooked up with the footloose Danish artist Fritz Melbye and took off with him for Haiti, then Venezuela, in the first of several bonding relationships he would form with painters, all of them transformative for him.
It was as an aspiring artist that he went back to France more or less permanently in the 1850s. While keeping the examples of Corot, Courbet and Jean-François Millet as his lodestars, he studied with various painters in Paris, taking a little something from each, in a process of sampling and adopting influences that would lead to the criticism that his art was, stylistically, no more than a sum of many parts.
In 1860 he began a liaison with a young French Roman Catholic woman named Julie Vellay, hired as a servant by his mother, who had also returned to France. In 1861 the first of the couple’s eight children was born. (They married a decade later.)
By then he also had become deeply immersed in revolutionary politics, specifically in anarchist thinking that espoused a radically egalitarian, anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian society. Partly because this way of life was most easily realized in a rural setting, Pissarro moved his growing family to Pontoise, a farming village outside Paris, where, despite bouts of near poverty, he was known for keeping his home open to all visitors.
