Boulevard Montmartre, Mardi Gras

By 1897 Camille Pissarro was in his late 60s and could no longer paint outdoors for long, since a recurring eye infection made wind and dust unbearable. So he rented rooms with a view. From a window of the Grand Hotel de Russie he looked straight down the Boulevard Montmartre and painted it over and over, 14 canvases in different light and weather. This one catches Mardi Gras, the pre-Lenten carnival, the wide street packed with a holiday crowd and a procession pushing through it. Pissarro was a lifelong anarchist, and the mixing of clerks, workers and shoppers on a public holiday was exactly the Paris he liked. He worked fast here, in quick feathery strokes, the figures barely more than flecks moving under the bare winter trees.