Furthermore, Pissarro’s urban landscapes are also suggestive of his political agenda because he avoided the representation of social class distinctions in these works. In Pissarro’s later years, he completed a set of eleven different series, compiled of over three-hundred works depicting cityscapes. These works depicted various aspects of the French cities of Paris, Rouen, Dieppe, and Le Havre. Although the setting was different, Pissarro’s political outlook remained a powerful feature in these works. Some of these series depicted aspects designed to demolish class barriers (The Impressionist and the City). The Garden of Tuileries on a Winter Afternoon (1899, fig. 1), for example, was a scene repeatedly depicted in a cityscape series by Pissarro. During the Second Empire, a number of parks were created in Paris as a part of the Haussmannization of the city. These parks served as an equalizing element, meant to relax economic tensions among the classes. They also provided an opportunity for Parisians to relate back to nature, an integral relationship, according to anarchist ideals. The Tuileries Garden, however, “was initially constructed during the sixteenth century as the private garden of the royal Tuileries Palace” (Sewell 20). Interestingly, the garden had been made public to a select few—“anyone who was well dressed and well mannered”—during the middle of the seventeenth century (Sewell 20). Although Napoleon III made improvements to the Tuileries Palace after its destruction in the Revolution of 1848, the structure again fell to ruin. The Third Republic chose not to resurrect the palace, due to its imperial implications. The garden, however, was maintained and continued to act as a public park. In some ways, these parks functioned as they were intended, bridging the gap between the elites and the middle class, as “Parisian men and women…ceased to feel that dressing according to the old codes was mandatory or even desirable” (Sewell 24). This suited Pissarro’s anarchist beliefs, and explains his affinity for this subject matter. The lessening of the stratification of the classes through the installment of public parks played an important role in the anarchist movement, and suggests the reason for which Pissarro repeatedly depicted parks such as the Tuileries Garden.
In other such series, Pissarro continued to depict the city without the suggestion of class differentiation. For example, in his Place du Theatre Francais: Spring (1898, fig. 2), the individuals on the modern streets of Paris all appear to resemble one another. The common middle class costume suggests a continuity and lack of class distinction. In order to return to the theme of exclusion, Pissarro’s avoidance of labor and class divide in the cityscapes of the latter part of his career provide clear indications of his anarchist tendencies. In these landscapes, like the more rural landscapes at Pontoise, Pissarro neglects the poor and other elements of labor exploitation. Factories and shipyards, like the mills and quarries, became harmless elements of the landscape.
Pissarro's Politics: How the Neo-Impressionists Incorporated their Anarchist Beliefs 