The Watering Can ~ Georges Seurat ~ 1883

Georges Seurat (1891-1859) was a contemporary of Camille Pissarro. He died young, perhaps of pneumonia or meningitis. I've included one of his paintings here, The Watering Can (1883), not because we're finished with Pissarro (by no means), but simply because the oil on wood image is so wonderful and timely, as Spring is trying to get underway, and as we have entered the second half of Lent - The Church's Springtime.

This is a metal watering can, some time before plastic ones became available. The gardener has placed the can on the edge of a curved shelf. It's a little hard to tell if there is a wall there containing a raised bed or if the curved part is more like a curb. There is a rather high wall to the rear of the garden. 

The bright colored plants in the garden are likely lettuce which grows well in the early spring before the days grow hot. Maybe those are pole beans in the upper right hand corner. There are trees on the far side of the wall.

So, what's the watering can doing? It's simply sitting and waiting.  While we can spend a lot of time sitting and waiting (in traffic; in doctor's offices, on the phone) we don't always do it well because we have another "million things to do." But that's all the watering can is doing. It's waiting for the gardener to return, to pick it up, to fill it up perhaps and take it off to some part of the garden where the hose won't reach. Or maybe the gardener just enjoys watering plants by hand. 

"You visit the earth and water it," Psalm 65:9 says. Watering plants slowly, by hand, allows the gardener to watch the soil absorb the water, imagining the plant's gratitude. Using a watering can be a contemplative practice. It can help to slow down people who are wearied from zooming around.

Using a watering can can be a little way to participate in the divine life the psalmist speaks of - awakening compassion and care for thirsty life. I unravel the hose as far as it will go, and enjoy returning to it again and again to fill the watering can, and then to go off to the distant spots in the garden where I can watch the streams of water imitate heaven's rain. The repeated action is a little antidote to some of the anxieties which afflict us. For real.

The Snack, Child and Young Peasant at Rest ~ 1882

This is a rather remarkable painting. Notice again the grass and how it is created by thousands of little, individual strokes, and how that grass and the little girl's skirt seem to blend in together, so that we're not sure which is which. The girl isn't just harmonized with nature, but she's rooted or utterly grounded in it. 

The young mother forms a horizontal line while the trees on the little ridge above form vertical lines, as if the mother and child are locked into nature. One author, commenting on Pissarro's rural figures says: "They stand in the splendor of another world." We belong in nature. Do we realize this about ourselves? 

Floods of great destructive power are more frequent each year as we pave over the absorbing ground with concrete and asphalt, and the water has no where to go. Here in Pissarro's countryside, the ground is exposed, soft, alive and splendid.

We might appreciate too that unlike his contemporaries, Pissarro (who was fifty-two when he painted this picture) never depicts women in erotic poses. They wear homespun clothes, which while sometimes fitted, are not intended to be provocative. Indeed, it is said that one of the primary aims of 18th and 19th century painters of rural women, was to make them appear erotically available for urban viewers. 

Instead, Pissarro depicts women, especially young women, as "purposeful, strong, self-determined and evidently happy in their settings."  Here a young mother is comfortable and relaxed in the company of a little child who is enjoying her snack. Not a few people in our harried culture are losing these kinds of life-sustaining, life-enriching moments. 

Peasant Gathering Grass ~ 1881

The word "Peasant" appears in numerous Pissaro paintings. But for him, peasant, was never used in a pejorative sense. Unlike his 17th century predecessors and more than a few of his contemporaries, Pissarro didn't paint wanderers and beggar children, peasants in squalor with collapsing house and and junkyard property. The folks Pissarro painted in rural settings were honored workers. Life for the many workers was changing for the better with the Industrial Revolution. Pissarro never painted the remnants of a miserable peasant life, such as fishermen huts and cave dwellers.

Here, Pissarro gives us a peasant woman dressed not in gray, brown and black, but in shades of blue, including the principal color of her dress, which we might well call royal. For a  man who was decidedly not religious, even perhaps anti-clerical,  Pissarro seems to have understood the most foundational piece of Catholic morality: the dignity of every human person. Once we embrace this principle, everything is changed for us.

The 13th century Franciscan pope, Nicholas IV, wrote: "The ultimate test of your greatness is the way you treat every human being."  Who am I to change a pope's words, but I will anyway. I would say, "how you think of every human being". Pissarro thinks highly of human beings, especially those whose work is considered lowly. Not only is the lady's dress royal blue, but the very ground beneath her is energized and sparkling. Pissaro is not a romantic, rather, I'd say he has spiritual vision. The high-end lawyer and the fellow who cleans the public toilets: the same.

Notice too that while the woman collects "grass" (perhaps really the herbs found growing in the grass - the way some Italians still collect dandelion leaves for wine) she might be said to be tumbling or falling over. In the 1980s there was a lively country song with lyrics: "Timber, I'm falling over, falling in love with you." And the trickster might say to us, "You fell for that one, hook, line and sinker." 

But I'm thinking more of that splendid Catholic Prayer we might  pray after receiving Holy Communion - Anima Christi: "Soul of Christ, sanctify me. Body of Christ, save me. Blood of Christ, inebriate me..."

Inebriate is largely understood negatively today. "The police pulled him over because he was inebriated." Drunk. But the broader sense is more simply to fall over, to be knocked off one's feet, to be toppled in awe. That's the sense I get here. This lady, who seems to be falling, reminds me of the soul which has gotten out of its head (where a lot of religious people live) and is falling into the beauty of God, the love of God, the arms of God's mercy and compassion. Have you ever experienced that?