Camille Pissarro, 'The Pork Butcher', 1883

A young woman is absorbed in her task, slicing a layer of fat off a side of bacon, carefully peeling it back as she goes. On the other side of her stall, a woman seems to be tasting a slice of salami. Just behind her, to the right, a third is assessing the goods on another table. We can see the rest of the market beyond the struts of the butcher’s stall and beneath the canopies. These create a kind of tunnel, partly revealing but also obstructing our view of the bustle of shoppers and vendors. In this picture, Pissarro gives us a sense of what it is like to be among them.

He knew that feeling well. The painting is set in the main square of the town of Pontoise, a few kilometres to the north-west of Paris. Pissarro had moved to the nearby village of Osny the year before. He often visited the weekly market. At this time he was moving away from pure landscape painting, where figures were included to create a sense of scale and perspective. He became more concerned with capturing the people themselves, engrossed in their day-to-day lives.

Pissarro painted five oil paintings of similar market scenes during the 1880s. Three are set in Pontoise and two at nearby Gisors. He also made gouaches, drawings and etchings. The figures in these pictures are nearly all women. He was interested in reflecting on the female role in rural society. These women were the suppliers, artisans and shoppers who formed the link between the production and consumption of food. In July 1883 he wrote to his son Lucien: ‘I am obsessed with a desire to paint figures which are difficult to compose with. I have made some small sketches; when I have resolved the problem in my mind, I shall get to work. I had Nini pose as a butcher’s girl at the Place du Grand Martoy; the painting will have, I hope, a certain naive freshness. The background, that’s the difficulty.’

We can see from X-radiographs of the painting that, even after working on these sketches, Pissarro made changes to the composition. These included altering the stance of the woman on the right. She was originally depicted in profile, bending over to the left in an echo of the posture of the pork butcher herself. Pissarro’s challenge was to arrange the figures among the stalls in a way that is both convincing and draws the viewer into the picture. Here, we get a view of the market, but the figure in the foreground dominates the scene. In later market paintings he preferred a more dynamic arrangement, often with three figures in the foreground rather than one.

He initially painted an older figure, perhaps his wife, Julie Vellay, as the butcher. But then he reworked her to make the butcher look much younger. Perhaps this, along with his light rapid brushwork, was part of his search for a fresher, more spontaneous feel in the painting. His second model was Nini (Eugénie Estruc), his much younger niece. She appears in a number of other portraits by Pissarro. We don’t know if, or how, Pissarro explained to his wife why he replaced her with a younger model.