Boulevard Montmartre, Morning, Cloudy Weather
Camille Pissarro (1830 to 1903) · 1897
From a hotel window high above the boulevard, Pissarro looks down on a Paris morning. Carriages and omnibuses move along the wide street, tiny figures crowd the pavements, bare trees line the road, and the tall apartment buildings recede toward a grey sky. It is early spring, the weather is dull, and the light is soft and even. Pissarro was sixty six, and an eye infection made it painful for him to work outdoors, so in February 1897 he took a room at the Grand Hotel de Russie on the corner of the Boulevard Montmartre and painted the view fourteen times, at different hours and in different weathers.
Look at how much life he packs into the picture with so little detail. Each carriage is a few strokes of black and brown; the people are dots of colour; the wet road is a broad sweep of grey lilac with reflections of the traffic. Yet the whole scene has depth and movement, and you can almost hear it. The brushwork is denser and more textured than in Monet, because Pissarro had spent some years painting in the pointillist manner of Seurat and never quite lost the habit of building a surface out of small touches. The high viewpoint, looking down along the diagonal of the street, was something the Impressionists borrowed from photography and Japanese prints.
The National Gallery of Victoria bought the painting through the Felton Bequest in 1905, which made it one of the first Impressionist pictures to enter any public collection in the world, and the first in Australia. It matters because it shows Pissarro, the oldest and most generous of the Impressionists, taking on the modern city in his final years and finding it beautiful even under cloud. The series to which it belongs is scattered across museums from Saint Petersburg to New York. The memorable detail is the row of leafless trees, which give the picture its rhythm like the beats of a bar of music.
Did You Know? Bought in 1905, it was the first Impressionist painting to enter an Australian public collection, and one of the first anywhere.
Unlock the Full Guide
Read every room and listen to every work in all museums with premium.