Pissarro’s People, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Pissarro's daugher Minette: ‘Sitting in the Garden’, 1872

Of all the Impressionists, Camille Pissarro was not the most illustrious, most brilliant, or most prolific. He is known as a meticulous recorder of urban views and rural panoramas, but he never won much acclaim as a painter of the human figure. So the Clark Art Institute’s decision to consecrate an exhibition to Pissarro’s People might seem a little perverse. Yet this show, by turns beguiling, tender, edifying and poignant, has plenty to reveal about Pissarro’s lifelong engagement with the family members, friends, servants and strangers who thronged his life and populated his canvases.

He was an expansively social creature and a man of powerful egalitarian convictions. His friendships ran far and deep, extending from fellow renegades to young Post-Impressionists. From his outpost in Pontoise, just outside Paris, he mentored Cézanne, Seurat and Gauguin, and the influence ran both ways; while dispensing wisdom and support, he also soaked up lessons in colour and style.

Though he felt at ease in various overlapping clubs, Pissarro came from the farthest reaches of the European periphery. He was born in 1830 on the Caribbean Island of St Thomas, then a Danish colony, to Sephardic Jewish parents who were not married at the time. His father was French, as were his mother’s parents, but he attended the local Moravian school, where he spoke only English. In one early canvas, painted from memory after he had left the island, two Afro-Caribbean women stop to gossip on a coastal path, a pair of dark, solid figures in the bleached hot haze. The picture avoids the exoticism that so many of his French colleagues would have capitalised on; the women are matter-of-fact features of a familiar landscape.

Pissarro settled in France in the 1850s, and started taking cues from realists such as Courbet and Jean-François Millet. He imbibed their complex, ambivalent ways of portraying peasantry, adapting Millet’s aesthetic of rural purity and Courbet’s calculated crudity, and filtering these through political beliefs that leaned heavily towards anarchism. He also took up with his mother’s maid, a French Catholic woman with a solid frame and ruddy cheeks, who bore him eight children over 21 years – the last when she was 45.

The show’s curator, Richard Brettell, elegantly ties together Pissarro’s affable personality, spontaneous empathy, and political convictions, finding evidence for all three in deceptively straightforward portraits. The people in his paintings were simultaneously vessels of feeling and ideological emblems, contented individuals and members of a society in need of revolution.

Pissarro’s multitudinous family elicited his finest work. The pictures of his aged mother, Rachel, brilliantly blend loyalty with loathing. Rachel disapproved of her son’s liaison with a non-Jewish servant, and never let either forget it. Pissarro captures the sour discontent in her pudgy features as she accepts the ministrations of her maid or lies listlessly in bed. He notes the furrowed forehead, the scowling mouth, the discontented dip of the head. Yet in a self-portrait made just after her death at 94, he also records the sense of loss and abandonment etched in his own haunted gaze.

More moving still are the impressions of his favourite daughter, Minette, who died in 1874 when she was only nine. Pissarro caught her delicate features in sunlight and shadow, as she leaned over a bouquet of flowers or posed, with adult earnestness, beside a table laden with tchotchke (knick-knacks). In one stunning portrait, her shadowed eyes meet ours in vibrant communion. The last, devastating image of Minette was taken on her deathbed. Vitality and solidity have evaporated, and all that’s left is a pale cheek on a pillow.

When he had less at stake emotionally, Pissarro’s figures bordered on banality. The farmers who populate his landscapes were meant to illustrate utopian ideals of rural collectivism and egalitarianism. Though sketched from life, they assume the generic, all-purpose qualities of an agrarian idyll. Pissarro romanticised the harshness of peasant life in the name of right-thinking politics, transforming the specificities of grim effort into picturesque vignettes of hay rolling and apple picking.

There is a curiously reactionary quality to his progressive politics. Pissarro responded to industrial exploitation by demanding a return to the land and to ancient cycles of life. Where Monet struggled to capture a single instant in an ever-changing panorama, a curiously timeless, almost biblical, aura surrounds Pissarro’s farms and meadows: thus have milkmaids always laboured, and oxen ever ploughed. Here, Pissarro has more in common with the French Barbizon school than his fellow Impressionists, and especially with Millet, who also portrayed the eternal peasant tilling the fields, harvesting wheat and slumbering in the sun.

If Pontoise is Pissarro’s Eden before the Fall, an album of drawings he made in the 1880s encapsulates its aftermath. Titled “Turpitudes Sociales”, they adumbrate the ills of modern urban capitalism in a series of crude, propagandistic gestures. With one nod to Goya and another to Daumier, Pissarro savages the hypocrisies of bankers and factory owners and bemoans the exploitation of workers. Made for his nieces as an anarchist chapbook, they roil with rage and righteous indignation. This is the first time the drawings have been seen in a museum, and they make a fascinating contrast with Pissarro’s sometimes saccharine utopia.

Pissarro considered himself a manual labourer, a wielder of tools and manipulator of pigments, fabricating images by dint of dogged, repetitive movements. Yet it is hard to escape the feeling at the Clark that we are seeing the world through contentedly bourgeois eyes. The servants he paints have a vibrant dignity, haloed as they are by an animate, polychrome atmosphere of tiny daubs – but they are still, presumably, emptying his bedpans. One whole room is devoted to market scenes. These intricate, joyous and raucously civilised tableaux embody the artist’s ideal of farmers profiting from the fruits of their work without exploitative middlemen or intrusive regulation. But seen in the bucolic setting of the Berkshires, they resemble local boutique farmers’ markets, where heirloom tomatoes and organic greens are traded for fistfuls of cash. Could it be that the anarchist paradise lies just beyond the museum’s doors, in the prosperous, verdant hills of western Massachusetts?

‘Pissarro’s People’ continues until October 2

www.clarkart.edu