Boulevard of Capucines

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Boulevard of Capucines: Claude Monet

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Claude Monet Oil Painting - Boulevard of Capucines

Keywords: Boulevard, Capucines

Work Overview: Boulevard of Capucines
Claude Monet
Alternative name: Boulevard des Capucines (Monet)
Date: 1873 - 1874
Style: Impressionism
Genre: cityscape
Media: oil, canvas
Dimensions: 80.3 cm × 60.3 cm
Location: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, US

From the late 1860s, Monet and other like-minded artists, met with rejection from the conservative Académie des Beaux-Arts which held its annual exhibition at the Salon de Paris. During the latter part of 1873, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Sisley organized the Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs to exhibit their artworks independently. At their first exhibition, held in April 1874, Monet exhibited the work that was to give the group its lasting name, Impression, Sunrise. Among the works Monet included in the first Impressionist exhibition was The Luncheon, 1868, which features Camille Doncieux and Jean Monet. The painting was rejected by the Paris Salon of 1870.[1]

Also in this exhibition was a painting titled Boulevard des Capucines, a painting of the boulevard done from the photographer Nadar's apartment at no. 35. Monet painted the subject twice and it is uncertain which of the two pictures, that now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, or that in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City (shown here) was the painting that appeared in the groundbreaking 1874 exhibition, though more recently the Moscow picture has been favoured.

Boulevard des Capucines captures a scene of the hustle and bustle of Parisian life from the studio of Monet's friend, the photographer Felix Nadar. Applying very little detail, Monet uses short, quick brushstrokes to create the "impression" of people in the city alive with movement. Critic Leroy was not pleased with these abstracted crowds, describing them as "black tongue-lickings." Monet painted two views from this location, with this one looking towards the Place de l'Opera. The first Impressionist exhibition was held in Nadar's studio, and rather appropriately, Monet included this piece in the show.

There are two paintings of this view from the studio of the photographer, Nadar. This one shows that Monet used the Japanese mobile viewpoint to embody the fragmentary, yet dynamic modern experiences of space as the eye plunges into the deep channel of the crowded street, and seeks to disentangle the clues to the complex visual experiences given by a myriad detached brushstrokes. Fragmentation is also created by the double perspective thrust formed by the apartment blocks on the left and by the line of wintry trees and snow-topped cabs in the middle of the composition. This unusual off-centre perspective could owe something to another Hiroshige print in Monet’s collection,Sudden shower over Ohashi Bridge and Atake, where the bridge, seen from above, cuts across the river in strong counterpoint to the tree-covered distant shore. The cool tone given by the rain drenching the pedestrians is similar to the icy atmosphere in the Boulevard des Capucines. Monet has also isolated his figures on the snow-covered pavements, but his brushstrokes fuse them into groups, just as a crowd melds the movements of many individuals.

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Meyer Shapiro comment on the newness of urban experience in the nineteenth century relates to Monet’s choice of technique in Boulevard des Capucines:

“This feeling that the self has been wholly dissolved by the world or the world has been absorbed into oneself, so that the boundary between self and world has been erased or blurred in sensation, is an experience often described in the literature of the nineteenth century. It has its positive and negative aspects, according to the place of this feeling in the larger field of an individual’s goals and activities.”

Meyer Shapiro, Impressionism: Reflections and Perceptions (New York: George Braziller, 1997), p. 38

Matthew Simms explains the innovative way Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines involved beholders:

“Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines, exhibited in the 1874 [Impressionist] exhibition, for example, does not simply offer a passive viewing experience in which an instantaneous impression is served up finished to the spectator….Low down around the tree trunks appear numerous horizontal marks of silvery gray pigment. These marks at once indicate the roofs of carriages seen through the leafless branches and trunks, and appear to hover suspended on this side of the trees, owing to the way in which they frequently run across the trunks. Such ambiguities, rather than being failures in the image, are in fact the very entry points for the perception of the beholder, the teasing limnal regions that call upon the beholder to take up the transcribed perception and to explore its ambiguities, just as if they were encountered in real perception, like squinting to make out the lineaments of a fog enshrouded boulevard or pausing to gain one’s bearings in a steam- and smoke-filled train station. This narrowing of the gap between daily perception and viewing paintings caused consternation for [art critic Jules-Antoine] Castagnary. ‘I never could find the right optical point from which to look at Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines,’ he complained. Becoming sarcastic, he concluded: ‘I think I would have had to cross the street and look at the picture through the windows of the house opposite.’”

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