Camille Pissarro was twenty-four when he worked on this painting, while living on the Caribbean Island of St. Thomas. But notice, it's unfinished. The faraway mountains, the trees throughout - painted roughly. The building on the left - just a light sketch on a white canvas.
Here's a little Pissarro bio that might help us to understand. When Camille was twelve (1842) he was sent to a French boarding school near Paris, where the director encouraged his artistic interests. He returned to his birthplace of St. Thomas five years later (1847) to work in his father's hardware store. In 1850 (age 20) he met and traveled with the Danish painter Fritz Melbye, who painted exotic scenes for wealthy Europeans. Two years later Camille traveled with Fritz to Venezuela where he made a professional life-choice to be a painter. In 1853, his younger brother, Gustave, died. In 1854, the year of this painting, Pissarro returned to Saint Thomas to help with the family business, eventually moving to Paris to pursue his studies as a painter.
What a busy young man. We might assume with all of this going on, it's no wonder the landscape went unfinished.
But closer to home, as Lent begins in eleven days, do I have some sense that there is something unfinished about myself? That God, who knows me inside and out, might have something in mind that needs inner work. Someone said to me when I was a young priest, "With you, it's never enough." It wasn't meant as a compliment. But Jesus didn't call his apostles together to go on holiday. And if there's any theme repeated again and again in the Gospels, it's Jesus walking down the road to the next place.
We might have a second look at Pissarro's painting and prayerfully ask, "Lord Jesus, this Lent, is there some unfinished business I need to attend to? Something yet to accomplish that you want me to understand? Some vision of myself with you that needs attention?"
