Here is one of Camille Pissarro's earliest paintings. If the date is correct, he would have been twenty-four at the time. It is one of the first of many paintings whose title begins with the word Woman. This is a Caribbean woman: Pissarro having returned from Venezuela to St. Thomas to help his father with the family business.
Already, as a young man, Camille isn't painting great military battles, dramatic mythological or religious scenes, but an ordinary lady going about the business of her daily life. Notice too that he has not painted the woman as depressed or bent over in the drudgery of her life, but tall, even statuesque though barefoot, and happy.
Pissarro honors this woman in the dignity of her life. She doesn't wear dirty rags, but a flowing, patterned scarf, standing proudly on the road which likely links her home with the well or market where she has filled her jar. We'll see that Pissarro never paints people in a degraded state - everyone has a valuable contribution to make. No one is negligible or disposable. This is a wonderful insight for a painter so young, who is not religious, and whose society (like our own) was striated: a few who have a lot, and the many who have little or nothing.
This painting was created 165 years ago. And there are still many women in the world who go barefoot. Many women in the world who carry burdens on their heads. Many women in the world who travel dirt roads. Many women in the world who inwardly possess the dignity of the Children of God but who are ground up, abused, exploited and essentially invisible.
Pissarro honors this woman in the dignity of her life. She doesn't wear dirty rags, but a flowing, patterned scarf, standing proudly on the road which likely links her home with the well or market where she has filled her jar. We'll see that Pissarro never paints people in a degraded state - everyone has a valuable contribution to make. No one is negligible or disposable. This is a wonderful insight for a painter so young, who is not religious, and whose society (like our own) was striated: a few who have a lot, and the many who have little or nothing.
This painting was created 165 years ago. And there are still many women in the world who go barefoot. Many women in the world who carry burdens on their heads. Many women in the world who travel dirt roads. Many women in the world who inwardly possess the dignity of the Children of God but who are ground up, abused, exploited and essentially invisible.
These are the victims of what is known in our own country as otherism. For all the talk of our nation being a melting pot - no nationality or race comes to this country without first having to run the gauntlet of being hated and unwelcome. Often then, the ones who were hated, in time become the new haters. It's the nation's original sin.
We're a church-y nation - significant numbers of Americans are in church each Sunday morning. Yet for all of the religious do-ing, there's still lots of folks with hate in their hearts - people who are unwilling to see and accept other people in their diversity and variety, as precious and born of God. Troubling to say, but things don't seem to be getting any better.
So, in view of young Pissarro's happy painting, we might have a care for the folks who wash the restaurant dishes; the waitresses; the ones who stock the store shelves; the ones who clean offices, hotel and hospital rooms; who do the scut work of nursing homes, who work the night shifts; clean bathrooms; back-breakingly pick lettuce, strawberries, cabbages and apples. Very often these bottom- of-the-pile folks come from far away places, are under-paid, exposed to health hazards, and have little sense of their dignity and worth.
