Dancing light, vibrant colour, huge skies – it’s no wonder that artists have always flocked to the West Indies. But the islands have produced artists of their own, and they include one of the truly great Impressionists, Camille Pissarro.

Pissarro was born, in 1830, into a Sephardic-Jewish trading family in Charlotte Amalie, the port and capital of St Thomas. You can still see the building, at 14 Dronnigen’s Gate, where they lived upstairs, over the shop. His father was from Spain, his mother from Dominica.

The family business was dry-goods importation, and young Pissarro’s obvious destiny was to join his father’s firm. As soon as he finished secondary school (in France), aged 17, he was sent down to the docks. He hated the work, and the ‘bondage to bourgeois life’. But relief was at hand. The head of his primary school in Paris had spotted his talent for drawing and urged him to focus on the subjects he would find back home. It was the best advice anyone could have had. Down at the docks he sketched furiously: boats, rocks, people – the teeming life of the port. Business may well have suffered.

But it wasn’t enough, and when a young artist called Melbye arrived from Denmark, Pissarro took his chance. The two ‘bolted’ to Venezuela, to paint and sketch full time. Though he loved the colour and life around him – his warm sympathy with the people was a constant inspiration – he was also fascinated by the movement of light. In Caracas, as in St Thomas, there was plenty of it about.

Seeing his determination, his parents relented. In 1852 they sent him back to Paris to study. But current French art theory was all wrong for him. They didn’t understand light! Luckily, one day he met two young men of similar minds, Monet and Cézanne. The rest, as they say, is history. Pissarro became one of the founding fathers of the greatest movement in 19th-century art, and an inspiration to many of its leading painters. Even Van Gogh acknowledged his influence.

What history has been slower to record is the part played in all this by his Caribbean background. Those early experiences, and his first attempts to record them, were seminal.
In 1996 a unique gathering of the early sketches and canvases was displayed in his native St Thomas. Most had been taken to the US and ascribed to his better-known friend Melbye. No wonder they were overlooked.

But even in the work of his French period their touch remains undimmed. First, there is the continuing fascination with light. His pictures, even the darker-toned portraits, shimmer. The landscapes tremble with aliveness to the play of shadow and moving air. The product of long and careful thought, they burst with spontaneity. The colours have become the muted pastels of northern Europe, but the quiet intensity of life is perfectly Caribbean.

So too is the way they present ordinary people. Pissarro had loved the common folk of the islands, and recorded their forms and gestures with sympathy and humour. He adopts the same approach towards the peasantry of France and its servant class, one of whom he married. His friend Renoir painted such women as all appley curves and erotic potency. Pissarro’s are just good, kind people, doing a hard day’s work. Rather like himself, a true son of the region, and one of whom it can be proud.