Modern Life

Modern Paris: Boulevards, Leisure and Labor

Dance garden, train shed, café, theater box and music-hall bar

In the mid-1800s Paris was rebuilt with broad boulevards, railway stations, cafés and theaters. The Impressionists and painters close to them made this new city their subject. These ten pictures, from about 1874 to 1897, show its crowds, pleasures and workers, and the traits of Impressionism: everyday subjects, broken touches of color, shifting light and cropped, off-center views.

• Baron Haussmann's rebuilding replaced old streets with wide avenues and uniform apartment blocks.
• Leisure became a main subject: open-air dances, rowing on the Seine, cafés and theater boxes.
• The third Impressionist exhibition, in April 1877, showed several of these works together.

Haussmannization

Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris under Napoleon III: boulevards, parks, new apartment blocks.

modern life

Present-day city subjects, in place of history, myth or religion.

grands boulevards

Broad Right Bank streets lined with cafés, theaters and shops.

Works in this part

• Bal du moulin de la Galette
• Luncheon of the Boating Party
• Paris Street; Rainy Day
• The Floor Scrapers
• Young Man at His Window
• Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare
• In a Café (L'Absinthe)
• The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning
• A Loge at the Théâtre des Italiens
• A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

Image: Art Institute of Chicago Open Access (CC0) · Public domain