Inlet and sailboat

Pissarro reached Paris in the autumn of 1855, aged 25, and for a while he went on painting the Caribbean. He had grown up in Charlotte Amalie on Saint Thomas, then a Danish colony and a free port, where his father kept a general store near the harbour and where he filled sketchbooks with the shipping that came in. In 1852 he left for Venezuela with the Danish painter Fritz Melbye and spent two years drawing there. This cove with its single sailboat was painted in 1856, in France, out of that stock of drawings and memory. It is a small canvas, about half a metre across. By 1859 he was showing a landscape of Montmorency, just north of Paris, at the Salon, and the island subjects had stopped.