Boulevard Montmartre, Mardi Gras

From a hotel window, Pissarro watched the Paris carnival pour down the Boulevard Montmartre and painted it in quick, broken strokes. It was one of the last great works of a painter whose eyesight was failing.

The story behind the painting

In 1897 Camille Pissarro painted a series of fourteen views of the Boulevard Montmartre in Paris at different times of day and in different seasons. He worked from his window in the Grand Hôtel de Russie, high above the boulevard, first sketching the idea and then painting in oil on canvas. This canvas shows the Mardi Gras procession of the Carnaval de Paris stretching far into the distance; the carnival also included a parade before the masked ball at the Paris Opera. It is one of Pissarro's last major works, as his eyesight was weakening with age.

What to look for

At first glance the picture can look blurry, until the eye settles and finds the details hidden in the short, loose, semi-thick strokes that suggest movement. Clumps of men in black top coats fill the street, and riders on horseback are police patrolling the parade. The trees in front of the buildings are stylised so that streamers seem to fly through their branches. Unlike most of the series, the lower half clusters primary colours in a way that recalls pointillism, though up close the colours blend rather than sit as separate dots. The French Baroque buildings, in contrast, are drawn clearly and stay still.

Meaning and intent

Pissarro had turned from country landscapes to the city, and here he catches a crowd as one moving mass rather than individual figures. Some believe his study of Japanese art helped create the sense of distance, as the boulevard runs back in linear perspective. He had tested pointillism as an emerging scientific theory of art before this work, though the article judges he was not very talented in that style. Many critics think his failing eyesight shaped the unclear, spontaneous freedom of these late pictures.

Legacy

Pissarro studied at the Académie Suisse, where he met Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne, two of the most influential people in his life, and he kept moving in search of new direction. The Boulevard Montmartre series is among the results of his return to Paris. This canvas, about 65 by 81 cm, is on permanent display at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where visitors can still watch the carnival flow beneath a Paris window more than a century later.