Forest Path

1859 was the year Pissarro finally got in. He had been born on the Caribbean island of St Thomas, then a Danish colony, and had moved to France only four years earlier, at 25. That spring the Paris Salon accepted a landscape he had painted at Montmorency, north of the city, the first work of his to hang in the exhibition that made or broke a French career. That picture is now lost. He was drawing at the Academie Suisse, a cheap open studio with no teacher and no entrance exam, and it was there, the same year, that he met the young Claude Monet. Small woodland studies like this one belong to the habit he kept for the next 40 years, walking out of a village with a canvas under his arm. It stayed in private hands and came up for sale at Sotheby's in 2012.