Carnaval Boulevard des Capucines

Monet painted this looking down onto the Boulevard des Capucines from an upper window of the photographer Nadar's studio at number 35. That address matters. In April 1874 the same building hosted the first Impressionist exhibition, and this very view of the crowded boulevard hung in it. Recent study reads the throng below as a Carnival crowd, which places the picture in the late winter of 1874, whatever the '73 beside the signature suggests. Look at the people. They are dabs and flecks with no faces, the little dark strokes a hostile critic jeered at as tongue-lickings smeared on the canvas. Two top-hatted figures watch from a balcony at the right, about level with where Monet himself must have stood.