St. Martin (La St Martin)

Pissarro’s lasting concern for the plight of the peasant took the form of a positive and forward-looking vision of a rural utopia in which all people would work together in farming the land and live happily. His hopeful dream of unity may have arisen in part from residing at Pontoise, an agriculturally prosperous area at the border between the city and the country. For Pissarro, peasants were the means of realizing an anarchist ideal. His sketches, universal rather than individualized, sacrifice the specificity of costume and expression that characterized the much earlier, less sympathetic prints by Bellangé and Boilly.