Camille Pissarro is surely among the most protean figures among artists — not in the rarified sense of Picasso’s genius for acrobatic feats of creative dexterity, but as the Impressionist with a broad range of interests, Pissarro was an inveterate experimenter least bound by rules or norms. He was also the quasi-ringmaster of a concerted effort to breach the ramparts of the Salon, challenge its conventionality and bourgeois attitudes and raze that monolithic institution as an anarchist might — stone by stone, brick by brick.  It may be difficult for a 21^st century eye to appreciate its modernity, but in 1880 and within the context of the coming liberalism of the Third Republic, Le Père Melon fendant du Bois is as resolute in its defiance of Salon hegemony as it is a modern painting based on his own sensations of color and the presumed nature of spectral light as outlined by new scientific discoveries. It is among those works that assailed what critic Gustave Goetschy called, “the rugged virile simplicity of Millet” by brazenly emphasizing the immaterial effects of light and color in the interest of promoting freedom from covetous bourgeois attachment to materiality. Of Jewish bourgeois stock, Pissarro might seem ill-suited for the task of assuming the mantle of Jean-Francois Millet, recently passed in 1875. But as a man of great humility, utterly sincere in his faith in the goodness of others, Pissarro worked incessantly and lived a simple life of honest toil so that the requisite sympathy and understanding of rural living was a deep-seated element of his own experience.