Le Boulevard Montmartre, après-midi ensoleillé

In the winter and spring of 1897 Pissarro, by then in his 60s and troubled by an eye condition that made working outdoors hard, took a room at a hotel on the corner of the Boulevard Montmartre. From that window, high above the traffic, he painted the same stretch of the boulevard over and over, around 30 times, in rain and sun, morning and dusk. This is one of the sunny ones. The wide, tree-lined avenue below was itself fairly new, one of the grand streets cut through the old city by Baron Haussmann only a few decades earlier, and Pissarro treats it as pure modern spectacle, all carriages, hurrying dots of people and shopfronts. He was an old radical watching the new city stream past. The paintings of this one view in its different weathers were always meant to be seen together.