Not only does Pissarro step away from sensation libre, but he very much translates his political ideals of anarchism into his paintings of marketplaces. Indeed, Pissarro’s depiction of marketplaces was not simply a direct transcription of what he saw, what Joachim Pissarro calls these markets as “their own stages” with no precise “object of interest” (Joachim Pissarro,202). Quite the contrary is true: Camille Pissarro’s images very much emphasize the importance of the peasant over the bourgeoisie. The two ways in which he creates this emphasis is by placing the peasants in the foreground and, by using various techniques, truly managing to place the viewer in the peasant's shoes.
For example, in The Pork Butcher, the woman cutting the meat in the center is evidently the focus of the painting: she is closest to the viewer, and takes up a far larger portion of the work than do the other figures. Also, the colors of her clothes, particularly the white apron – coupled with the darkness of the other characters’ clothing – again place the emphasis on her. The staging of the work, in other words the way in which the peasant woman at the center of the painting is framed by two other women (one at her right and one at her left), and also the busy nature of the background reinforce the focus on her, the female peasant. Pissarro doesn’t even deem it necessary to include any bourgeois figures. Thus, in this painting, all elements seem to converge to produce one final effect: a focus on the peasants.
In The Poultry Market, Pissarro goes one step beyond: not only does he provide a clear focus on the female peasants, by placing several female peasant figures in the foreground of the painting and having them take up a large proportion of the work, but he includes some bourgeois figures. He places the latter figures in the background, thereby creating a distance between them and the viewer of the painting; this is clearly a political statement about what he wishes the viewer to feel, a reflection of his own anarchist views.
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Pissarro’s The Market Stall goes even further, by not only providing a focus on the female peasants and by including a social commentary on the bourgeois as in The Poultry Market, but also by essentially placing the spectator in the peasant’s shoes. As Thomson correctly states, we “literally side with the stallholders” (Thomson, 73): we see the peasant woman, who is again placed in the center and foreground of the painting, from the back, and the bourgeois ladies she is serving from the front. .png)
Thus, the scene is set up in a way which expresses Pissarro’s wish for us, the viewers, to experience the market stall for ourselves – as if we were the peasant woman, attempting to satisfy the demands of the condescending bourgeoisie. Even in Pissarro’s very few depictions of the larger city markets such as those of Paris, for example The St Honoré Market and A Corner of Les Halles, we again side with the peasants, the produce separating us from the bourgeoisie. In A Corner of Les Halles, this separation is even more blatant than in The St Honoré Market, since we see the peasants completely from behind rather than from the side, and the bourgeois women completely from the front rather than, again, from the side; this marks an even stronger contrast between the two.
On a side note, the scarcity of the city market paintings can be interpreted as an expression of Pissarro's preference for the country rather than the city; this, again, would reflect his anarchist views. Thus, in these paintings, Pissarro’s desire for a focus on the peasants and a distancing from the bourgeoisie, by placing us in the female peasants’ shoes opposite the bourgeois women, clearly comes through.