How might a picture of apple pickers be a symbol of environmental and food justice and pay equity?

Camille Pissarro’s Apple Harvest at the Dallas Art Museum is one of my favorite pictures of all-time. Actually, in a lot of ways this painting was radical and was seen pushing the idea of what was art because it highlighted women working, not nude reclining on a piece of furniture. I love it mostly because of who the artist was, Pissarro, the grandfather of Impressionism. He was Jewish, an anarchist, father to seven biological children, and mentor of many more. We don’t get A Sunday on La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat without Camille Pissarro (a story for another time). Pissarro was more than ten years older than most of the other Impressionist artists, such Pissarro was seen as a father figure. His fierce arguments about egalitarianism and the inequities of the system of juries and prizes were known to everyone. To answer my own question though, Pissarro was one of the few, if not first artist to pay female models to stand for the painting. There is some gender equity in the painting with the central male figure and supporting female figures. Their faces are blurred as if to offer anonymity. The two females in the bottom left are bending down, picking up apples for the market, for distribution. This is not your Saturday fall afternoon picking apples with your family for fun, this is work.

But, ultimately, I love this painting because it is a lovely picture. Sometimes paintings are just beautiful. It is okay to like something for its pure aesthetic reasons. I remember standing in front of the painting during Pissarro’s People at the Legion of Honor kind of in awe. I was fortunate to spend time with the picture over the course of the exhibition. I kept coming back to it. I loved it’s scale. The trees reminded me of California hillsides and the shadows are almost playful. The warm overtones. The movement of the workers. The horse and worker in the back corner. Never has hot, sweaty, back-breaking work looked so beautiful.  

Camille Pissarro, in full Jacob-Abraham-Camille Pissarro, (born July 10, 1830, St. Thomas, Danish West Indies—died Nov. 13, 1903, Paris, France) painter and printmaker who was a key figure in the history of Impressionism. Pissarro was the only artist to show his work in all eight Impressionist group exhibitions.

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