Tropical Forest

Tropical Forest is an exceptional work in Pissarro's output, dating from his early years in the French Antilles — he was born in St Thomas, Danish West Indies, in 1830 to a French-Jewish family and spent his early adulthood in Venezuela and the Caribbean before moving permanently to France in 1855. These pre-French paintings are rarely encountered and document the visual formation of an artist who would become the most systematically French of the Impressionists. The lush tropical vegetation, so different from the Norman orchards and Pontoise hillsides of his mature work, records a visual world he left behind but never entirely forgot.

The dense tropical canopy is handled with the descriptive naturalism of Pissarro's pre-Impressionist phase, the technique reflecting the influence of Corot and the Barbizon tradition he was absorbing before developing his mature Impressionist method. Rich greens in multiple values suggest the layered depth of a tropical forest, the light filtering through the canopy as flickers of warm yellow against the cool green ground.