anarchists

The second sweetest thing at the "Pissarro's People" show at The Legion of Honor is a statement uttered on the audio guide ($6) that near the end of his life Pissarro painted "not what he saw but what he wanted to see."

Pissarro's paintings of working people of the mid to late 19th century--farmers, maids--are sweet but a little hazy, as if seen through a handkerchief.

The sweetest thing at the show is not by Pissarro, but of his era: a mezzotint of the writer Felix Feneon emerging from a French prison where he'd spent time for certain anarchist activities (left.)

Julian Barnes review of the posthumous publication of Feneon's Novels in Three Lines is worth reading, as is the book itself.____

Pissarro was also an anarchist. At the end of his life, unable to paint in direct sunlight, he worked indoors and turned auto-portraitist. Feneon, when invited by a publisher to write his memoirs, said, "I aspire only to silence."