Portrait of a boy

When Camille Pissarro painted this boy, around 1853, he was in his early twenties and living on Saint Thomas in the Danish West Indies, where his family ran a shop. He had not yet seen Paris, nor met the painters he would later stand beside as an Impressionist. His teacher then was Fritz Melbye, a Danish painter passing through the Caribbean, and portraits like this were how a young shop clerk taught himself to work in oils. Only two such portraits from his island years are known. This one stayed in a Danish family for more than a century and was recognised as a Pissarro only in 2018.