Ritratto di un ragazzo

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.