Description
This study explores slavery and emancipation through the work of the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro (1830-1903). Sometimes called the “Father of Impressionism,” Pissarro was a native of the Caribbean who came of age during the revolutions of 1848 and a cycle of slave rebellions and abolitions during the 1830s and 1840s. Heavily influenced by the coming of black freedom, Pissarro’s West Indian studies of former slaves in the first blush of liberation anticipated his emergence as an influential avant-garde artist and left a rich visual archive of freed people. While probing the Caribbean origins of Impressionism, Jon Sensbach’s study uses Pissarro’s art as a window onto black Atlantic life after emancipation.
