Boulevard montmartre winter morning 1897

Camille Pissarro

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Keywords: Boulevardmontmartrewintermorning

Work Overview

The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning
Artist:Camille Pissarro
Date:1897
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:25 1/2 x 32 in. (64.8 x 81.3 cm)


After spending six years in rural Éragny, Pissarro returned to Paris, where he painted several series of the grands boulevards. Surveying the view from his lodgings at the Grand Hôtel de Russie in early 1897, Pissarro marveled that he could "see down the whole length of the boulevards" with "almost a bird's-eye view of carriages, omnibuses, people, between big trees, big houses that have to be set straight." From February through April, he recorded—in two scenes of the boulevard des Italiens to the right, and fourteen of the boulevard Montmartre to the left—the spectacle of urban life as it unfolded below his window.


Pissarro's health obliged him to paint less in the open, where it was windy, and more indoors, from the window. In Paris (1893, 1897-98, 1902), Rouen) (1896 and 1898), Dieppe (1901) and Le Havre (1903) he rented rooms from which he enjoyed dynamic perspectives of squares and boulevards, the city and the river, or harbour and bridges. He painted variations and repeated views in order to capture various atmospheric moods and also to have something to offer to as many buyers as possible.