With his long white beard and somber expression, Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) looks like a biblical patriarch.

The oldest of the French Impressionists, he was a sort of father figure to the younger members of the movement and its inheritors. Ten years older than Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, he was old enough to be the father of Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, with whom he worked in his later years.

"Pissarro's People," a show of approximately 90 paintings and works on paper at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, examines an overlooked aspect of his work. Best known for his landscapes, Pissarro also devoted himself to depictions of the human figure in works that exemplified his political and social viewpoints.

According to Richard R. Brettell, the exhibition's curator, Pissarro frowned on the capitalism of his day, longing for a society run not by government but by like-minded individuals closely resembling the Libertarians of today.

A student of anarchistic philosophy, he looked forward to "an egalitarian society with no private property, no accumulation of wealth, and a sharing of all goods and services." Rather than a tea party activist, he was more like the current Occupy Wall Street visionaries who seek economic and social justice.

While not overtly political, Pissarro's many canvases of hearty, happy agricultural workers are utopian in spirit and, in some ways, resemble the works of later Social Realists. In "The Harvest," 1882, a rosy-cheeked peasant girl gathers sheaves of wheat in a long horizontal composition reminiscent of works by Pissarro's fellow Impressionist Edgar Degas. In "Apple Harvest," he offers an idyllic view of communal labor as workers come together to shake the fruit out of the trees and gather it.

While these visions of ennobled workers in the fields and at country marketplaces, not unlike today's farmers markets, are uplifting, they are also somehow generic and idealized into a sweetness that can be cloying.

More interesting are Pissarro's paintings of his family members. Though she didn't pose often, being busy rearing eight children and managing a frugal household, his wife, Julie, appears in drawings and may have been the model for his solid painting of a washerwoman. The children, especially his daughter Jeanne (called Minette), who died in childhood, appear frequently. (Since the Pissarros gave the name Jeanne to two daughters, the nicknames were useful.)

It is Pissarro's paintings of Minette - sitting in a garden, posing in a blue smock, languishing in illness and finally dying - that are among the most individual and moving works in the show.

Also fine is his portrait of 7-year-old Felix, still with the long hair of a toddler and visibly unhappy at having to pose for his father. A later image of Felix and one of his other daughter Jeanne (called Cocotte), reading little red books that may have been anarchist texts demonstrate Pissarro's love of learning, which he passed on to his children.

One room of the exhibition is devoted to a book of pen and ink drawings "Turpitudes Sociales" in which Pissarro's politics were openly expressed. Made as a teaching tool for his English nieces, pages of the book, which are reproduced, depict the suicide of a stock broker, a fat banker holding a bag labeled "capital" and a vision of the coming revolution. Not meant for public viewing, the book and its images are seen here for the first time.

In the final room of the exhibit, we see three self-portraits, a print and two paintings, one done three months before his death, in which Pissarro looking old and wizened stares out powerfully at the viewer. In many ways, Pissarro, a Sephardic Jew born in the Danish colony of Saint Thomas in the Caribbean, was an outsider in his adopted country of France. His apartness and aloneness is evident in his last, powerful self-image.

PISSARRO'S PEOPLE

What: This exhibit of roughly 90 works sheds light on Camille Pissarro as a painter of people, rather than landscapes. Pictures of his family and of ennobled workers reveal as much about Pissarro as they do about his anarchist politics.

Where: Legion of Honor, Lincoln Park, 34th Avenue and Clement Street, San Francisco

When: 9:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. Tuesday- Sunday, through Jan. 22.

Cost: $10, adults; $7, seniors; $6 youths 13-17 and students with college I.D.; free to members and children 12 and younger. General admission is free the first Tuesday of every month. There is a $5 surcharge for "Pissarro's People."

Information: (415) 750-3600, www.legionofhonor.org

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