Coconut Palms by the Sea, St. Thomas

Coconut Palms by the Sea, St. Thomas at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, painted in 1856, is among the most compositionally ambitious of Pissarro's Caribbean works, using the tall vertical forms of coconut palms to frame a luminous view of the Caribbean sea. The VMFA's collection, which holds this alongside the companion Paysage à St. Thomas from the same period, documents two of the rare surviving paintings from Pissarro's St. Thomas years. The coconut palm as a compositional device — tall, vertical, its fronds filtering light against a bright sky — had no precedent in the European landscape tradition in which Pissarro was training himself, and his handling of it shows both the limitation of applying European compositional conventions to tropical subjects and the genuine observational acuity that would develop into mature pictorial intelligence. The luminous Caribbean sea visible between the palm trunks — pale blue-green, intense, quite unlike the grey-green of the Seine or the Oise — established a relationship to open water and distance that remained characteristic of his spatial sensibility throughout his French career.

The painting uses careful tonal organization typical of Pissarro's early style — the dark palm trunks and fronds silhouetted against the bright sea and sky. The specific texture of palm fronds, quite unlike European deciduous trees, is observed with attentive particularity. The luminous sea is rendered in the pale blues and whites of Caribbean coastal light.