The Pork Butcher

The Pork Butcher of 1883 at the National Gallery in London is among the most deliberately direct of Pissarro's market subjects — a painting that places the raw commercial transaction of meat-selling at its centre without any of the softening that the bourgeois art market expected of peasant subjects. The work belongs to his transitional period between his Pontoise decade and his move to Éragny, when he was experimenting with a more focused figural approach to market and labour subjects. The National Gallery's holding of this canvas alongside its Dutch genre paintings and French Barbizon works allows it to be read within the tradition of market painting extending from Adriaen van Ostade through Gustave Courbet — but Pissarro's handling distinguishes itself from both the anecdotal warmth of Dutch genre and the provocative machismo of Courbet's market scenes. The figures are observed with the same democratic equality he brought to all his subjects: the butcher is neither pitiable nor heroic but simply a person doing her work, the canvas a record of labour that he considered as worthy of serious artistic attention as any historical subject.

The market stall setting demands a careful treatment of the contrast between the raw pinks and reds of pork products and the surrounding crowd. Pissarro uses his standard broken-colour technique to unify the busy market surface, individual figures rendered in short descriptive marks. The composition captures the density and energy of a market crowd without losing the specific human and commercial focus of the central subject.