Boulevard Montmartre, morning, cloudy weather

In 1904 a Melbourne businessman named Alfred Felton died and left money to buy art for the National Gallery of Victoria. The first buyer sent to Europe to spend it was the gallery's own director, the painter Bernard Hall. In London in 1905 he found this canvas at the Grafton Galleries, lent there by Paul Durand-Ruel, the Paris dealer who had backed the Impressionists since the 1870s, and bought it. It became the first Impressionist painting in the Melbourne collection, arriving only two years after Pissarro's death, and it drew some criticism in the local press. The view is from a hotel window in early 1897, looking east down the boulevard on a grey morning. The trees are still bare, the carriages run in dark lines down the middle of the road, and at lower right he signed it C. Pissarro, 97.