Square du Vert Galant, Sunny Morning 1902

Camille Pissarro made Square du Vert Galant, Sunny Morning as an oil on canvas. Look at how the dabs of color create the feeling of light filtering through the trees. The way Pissarro builds up the image feels a bit like improvisational jazz, each stroke responding to the last. The surface has a tangible quality, a topography of paint, not thick, but enough that you could spend a long time tracking the individual brushstrokes. Notice how the orange in the trees is echoed in the ground below, connecting the space from top to bottom. There's a real feeling of a moment captured, like a snapshot of a sunny morning in Paris. The figures become a blur, as if they're always moving, never quite still. Pissarro was a mentor to many Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters, including Paul Cezanne. I think it's the open-ended, experimental quality of Pissarro's work, his willingness to embrace ambiguity, that makes it so resonant for artists even today.