Two Women Chatting by the Sea, St. Thomas

Camille Pissarro

National Gallery of Art

Two dark-skinned women stand facing each other on a dirt path that runs beside a body of water in this horizontal painting. One woman faces us and balances a flat tray loaded with white cloths on her head. Her left hand, on our right, holds the tray steady. The apron or loose, long skirt of her off-white dress is bunched up around her hips, but the fabric still falls to her ankles. A dark green, red, and brown scarf covering her head is tied in a knot by one ear, and the ends fall in front of that shoulder. The other woman stands in front of the first, to our left with her back to us. She wears an aquamarine-blue dress and garnet-red scarf tied around her head. A brown basket hangs from her left arm. The path angles from the lower right corner and cuts into the distance to our left. It is lined with brown and green bushes and grasses. An expanse of dirt to our right reaches to the shoreline, which curves like a C into the distance. Dabs of brown and dark pink suggest several more people standing or stooping in the surf in the distance. Shallowly sloping rust-brown hill cut into the water, spanning left two-thirds of the width of the composition along the horizon. The sky in the top half of the composition is a clear, milky white. The artist signed and dated the lower left corner, “C.Pizarro. Paris 1856.”