Felix Pissarro Wearing a Red Beret

This is Pissarro's third son, Felix, known in the family as Titi, painted in 1881 when he was seven. Pissarro made portraits of his children the way other Impressionists painted landscapes, over and over, and here he catches the boy's shyness exactly, half-hidden behind a curtain of long hair, peering out warily from under his fringe in his soft cap and knotted scarf. He gives the whole thing a quiet harmony, the reds of the cap and scarf answering the tones in the child's hair. Felix grew up to be a painter and caricaturist, as his father hoped, but he was tubercular, and he died in England in 1897, only 23.