A Creek in St. Thomas (Virgin Islands)

Of all the Impressionists, only Pissarro grew up under palm trees. He was born in 1830 on Saint Thomas, then a Danish island in the Caribbean, into a merchant family who wanted him behind a shop counter. He drew the harbour and the hills instead, ran off to Venezuela to sketch for two years, and by 1855 had settled in Paris for good. This quiet creek, painted around 1856, looks back at the island he had just left, the still water, the heavy green, the light of a place nothing in French landscape had prepared him to paint. He was in his mid-twenties and still years from the loose, bright touch we now call Impressionist. He never went back to the Caribbean.