Three kinds of light on one street
The brightest marks running down the middle of the boulevard are electric arc lamps, still a modern sight in 1897. Pissarro rings their cold white globes with blue. The shop windows beside them glow with warmer gaslight, while the waiting horse-drawn cabs carry much smaller oil lamps. Three lighting technologies occupy the same wet street.
The rain matters. Reflections stretch every lamp into the pavement, turning points of light into bands of blue, gold and orange. On the right, the Théâtre des Variétés burns particularly brightly. What might have been a grey evening becomes a study in how a modern city manufactures its own colour after dark.
Fourteen paintings from one window
Pissarro took a room at the Grand Hôtel de Russie on Rue Drouot and painted the Boulevard Montmartre in snow, rain, fog, mist and sunlight, from morning to sunset. The series contains fourteen views, all made in 1897. This was the only night view in the group and, according to the National Gallery, the only night painting he ever made.
The repeated viewpoint was not repetition for its own sake. Weather, traffic and light continually rebuilt the scene. A fixed hotel window let Pissarro compare those changes without changing the underlying street.
A city assembled from dashes
From across the room the boulevard feels crowded and deep. Up close, pedestrians, carriages and reflections break into quick dabs and strokes. The strong diagonals of roofs and pavements hold this restless surface together, meeting near the centre as the street recedes toward the Porte Saint-Denis.
Pissarro was in his late sixties and increasingly troubled by an eye condition that made painting outdoors difficult. The elevated indoor viewpoint became an advantage. It gave him the whole sweep of the boulevard and turned the moving crowd below into a pattern no person standing at street level could have seen.
Sources and further reading
- National Gallery collection and catalogue entryThe painting, boulevard series, lighting and viewpoint.
- National Gallery Picture of the MonthClose-looking guide to the street and its lights.
- National Gallery of Art, Picturing FranceContext for Pissarro’s urban hotel-window series.