Boulevard Montmartre bei Nacht

In February 1897 Pissarro, by then in his late sixties, took a room in a hotel overlooking the Boulevard Montmartre and painted the same stretch of street over and over, in snow, rain, fog, morning and afternoon, about 14 canvases in all. This is the only one he painted after dark. Paris was in the middle of switching from gas to electricity, and the picture is really a study of that changeover. The cool white pools down the centre are the new electric lamps. The warmer yellow glow along the shopfronts is older gaslight, and the little moving flecks are the oil lamps on the passing cabs. All of it is caught in reflection on the wet paving, which is where most of the light in the painting actually lives.