The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning

A wide Paris boulevard on a grey winter morning, seen from a hotel window high above the crowd. Pissarro painted it at sixty-six, when his dealer hoped a series of city views might do as well as Monet's haystacks.

The story behind the painting

In February 1897 Camille Pissarro took a hotel room at the corner of the boulevard des Italiens and the rue Drouot, at the invitation of his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. The plan was a series of paintings of the boulevard Montmartre at different times of day. Pissarro wrote to his son Lucien that Durand-Ruel might be interested in a series of Paris street views, all the more because Claude Monet's series of haystack paintings had sold well.

What to look for

The canvas, about 65 by 81 cm, is signed and dated at lower left: C. Pissarro. 97. The street runs away in perspective toward a vanishing point in the upper left third, curving gently to the left. Crowds, carriages and omnibuses fill the wintry city. Rows of windows on uniform facades, Morris columns and advertising pillars along the pavements, and street lamps set in the middle lead the eye far into the distance, under a pale grey, lightly clouded sky.

Meaning and intent

By 1897 Pissarro had already moved away from Impressionism and from the pointillist technique he had tried before. This view belongs to a series of fourteen canvases showing the same boulevard in different seasons and under different light. Seen from above, the city becomes one vast moving picture, and a soft, diffuse brightness from the grey sky bathes the whole scene. The source describes the view as the painter's image of the perfect modern metropolis of his time.

Legacy

The painting is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It came to the museum in 1960 as a gift from the collector Katrin S. Vietor, in memory of her husband Ernest G. Vietor. Within the series of fourteen views, this one keeps the specific light of a winter morning, recorded from the same hotel window from which Pissarro watched the boulevard change through the days and seasons of 1897.