Uruguayan artist Pedro Figari’s The Marketplace depicts an archetypal South American plaza complete with an arcade and colonial church in the background. The plaza is filled with activity, with more than a dozen figures buying or selling wares or casually socializing. Rendered in a loose gestural style akin to impressionism, Figari’s figures are merely daubs of paint with unidentifiable features. Their multicolored tunics create a lively pattern over the surface of the canvas. Exactitude was not his goal; rather he aimed to capture the movement and activity of the marketplace. Stray dogs play and jump around the vendors, colorful piles of fruit and vegetables are stacked on blankets, women in head scarves and long dresses haggle over prices. Behind the figures, several pastel colored buildings rise above the plaza creating a sense of enclosure. Figari’s choice to employ certain aspects of impressionist technique (loose visible brushwork, bold color, and an emphasis on rhythm and motion rather than minute detail in his work) most likely stemmed from his 1913 visit to Paris where he attended an exhibition of impressionist paintings at the Durand Ruel Gallery that included works by Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Degas, and Cézanne. However, unlike these artists, Figari did not paint scenes of modern leisure observed from life. Whether painted in Paris, Uruguay, or Argentina, Figari’s scenes were nostalgic imaginings of disappearing customs. He redeployed impressionist technique as a means to represent the fuzzy edges of memory, a past reconstructed according to the desires of the present and nostalgia for a bygone era. Born in Montevideo, Pedro Figari was an important politician, public intellectual, and literary figure before he gained recognition as an artist. He received a law degree in 1886 and spent most of his career as a lawyer, often serving as defense counsel for the poor. He was also a member of the Uruguayan Parliament, president of the Ateneo of Montevideo, and director of the Escuela Nacional de Artes y Oficios. In 1912 he published Arte, Estética, Ideal, a sweeping philosophical text on aesthetics, creativity, science, and religion, which was translated into French in 1920. While Figari had painted as a hobby throughout his life and took art classes with Italian painter Godofredo Sommavilla, he did not hold his first one-person show until 1921 in Buenos Aires. Two years later, when he was sixty-two, the prestigious Parisian Galerie Druet held an exhibition of his work that was extremely well received. Figari decided to move to Paris in 1925, exhibiting two more times at the Galerie Druet in 1925 and 1927 and participating in numerous group shows. Figari’s scenes of life and culture in the Río de la Plata region under the Rosas regime garnered the attention of several prominent French critics including Louis Vauxcelles, André Salmon, André Warnod, André Lhote, and Jean Cassou. His nostalgic renditions of disappearing local customs, such as folk dances, rituals and celebrations, gaucho life, the Argentine pampas, and the local black community, held great appeal for the French public. In 1930 George Pillement published a book on the artist, Pedro Figari, the only monograph on a Latin American artist to be published in Paris between the wars. Figari returned to Uruguay in 1933 and died five years later.