Paris Boulevard at Night

Around 1900 a lit-up street at night was still something people stopped to look at. Paris had taken early to gas and then to electric light, and its boulevards were where the city showed it off. The Museum of Fine Arts thinks this small picture on paperboard shows the Boulevard de Clichy in Montmartre, perhaps as Pierre Bonnard saw it from his studio window. What held him was what the lamps do. The trees are lit from underneath, and the shadows fall in several directions at once. Bonnard signed it at the lower right with a date the museum reads as 1900. Its first owner was Gustave Fayet, a wine grower from Béziers who bought Gauguin's work by the hundred and collected Redon and Cézanne beside it. In 1929 the Paris dealer Paul Rosenberg sold it to John Taylor Spaulding of Boston, who left it to the museum when he died in 1948.