There's a little humor in the full title of this painting: Pere Melon, The Woodcutter. Pere Melon translates Father Melon. But melon is the French word for the bowler hat worn by this kind of lower class working fellow.
Who is this man? Does he work for himself or someone else? Who are his people? Pissarro worked long and hard on this painting, using many thousands of paint strokes. Perhaps he was letting us know he understood the tedium of the man's work.
The painting's background isn't flat but seems to rise, as if the woodcutter is at the bottom of a hillside or slope. We don't see the top of the landscape, only part of a tree trunk leaning a bit to the left. But the ground, covered with grasses and small plants seems to sparkle with the energy of light and life. The paint strokes themselves seem to reflect the man's and the earth's energy.
This fellow is leaning into his work, isn't he? He steadies the branch with his left foot and grabs the saw solidly. "Put some back into your work" a supervisor might have called to a new worker years ago. This is a kind of labor many people are no longer interested in. Some years ago I hired an electrician to put path lights along the stone walk to the chapel. When he finished and presented the bill, I saw that the wires were left on top of the ground. When I asked about this, "Aren't you going to put the wires underground?" he said, "Oh, no one wants to dig anymore." Dig?! Lifting two inches of sod is now considered digging?
Anyway, Pissarro wants us to know that work has dignity and value. When a young woman shows up at the door of the novitiate of Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity, she's soon informed, "If you're going to last here, you have to be ready for not just work but real labor." That means sorting through heaps of street garbage looking for thrown away babies, scrubbing bedpans, washing soiled sheets by hand, preparing huge vats of food, picking infected people up off the pavement.
In our Lenten prayer we might ask for strength to endure the difficulties of our own work and perhaps become more mindful of those whose work makes our own lives nicer or easier, (an intercessory prayer for the Vietnamese woman who made my shirt) and blessings for those who in this world still have to work laboriously hard - including the animals who are alongside or ahead of them.
