겨울 아침의 몽마르트르 대로

By 1897 Pissarro was in his late 60s and a chronic eye infection made it painful for him to work outdoors in cold wind. His solution was to rent rooms high up in Paris hotels and paint the city from behind glass. From a window of the Grand Hotel de Russie that winter and spring he produced a run of about 16 views looking down the boulevards, 14 of them of the boulevard Montmartre alone, at different hours and in different weather. This is the cold early morning, hazy sun, the pavement wet, the traffic and pedestrians below reduced to quick dark strokes. The high, straight sweep of the boulevard driving back into the mist is the view he actually had, a working painter looking down at the street he could no longer comfortably stand in.