Boulevard Montmartre, Spring

Early in 1897 Pissarro, then in his late sixties, took a room in a Paris hotel on the Rue Drouot and painted the Boulevard Montmartre over and over, fourteen canvases in about two months. His eyes had troubled him for years, and working indoors at a high window suited him. From up there he could see, as he put it, down the whole length of the boulevards, an almost bird's-eye view of the carriages and crowds. This is the spring one, the bare winter trees just coming into leaf, the wide avenue Haussmann had cut through the old city busy with traffic. Pissarro cared less about the buildings than about the light and the shifting mass of people, which he could watch change hour by hour without leaving his chair.