The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning

1897

Oil on canvas, 64.8 × 81.3 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A busy boulevard seen from a hotel window on a gray winter morning. In this late series Pissarro brought the Impressionist study of light and weather to Haussmann's Paris.

Bare trees and gray light tie this canvas to one winter morning. Its fifteen companions from the same window change the hour and weather, an Impressionist way to study light.
In February 1897 he took a big room in the Grand Hôtel de Russie.
The street climbs from the bottom edge to a distant vanishing point.
Given to the Met in 1960 by Katrin S. Vietor, honoring her husband.

The grands boulevards were among the busiest streets in Paris. Pissarro, mostly a painter of villages and fields, left Eragny for long city stays in the 1890s.

Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access · CC0