La Plaza del Théâtre-Français en primavera

By 1898 Camille Pissarro could not really work outdoors anymore. A recurring eye infection made wind and dust unbearable, so he took to renting rooms high above the Paris streets and painting the city through the glass. From the Grand Hotel du Louvre that winter and spring he made about 15 canvases of this one square near the Comedie-Francaise, the same view again and again under changing light. Here it is spring. Down below, tiny figures cross between the horse-drawn tram stops and the carriages, the ordinary traffic of a city that Baron Haussmann had rebuilt into wide straight boulevards a generation earlier. Pissarro was not after a monument. He wanted the churn of the crowd, watched from a window he was more or less confined to.