Camille Pissarro painted Paris from his window

Person: Camille Pissarro
Lived: 1830–1903
Field: Impressionist painting
From: Danish-French

The story

In his last decade Camille Pissarro, by then the respected elder of the Impressionists, suffered from a recurring eye infection that prevented him from working outdoors except in warm weather. For a painter who had spent his life working in the open air, finishing pictures on the spot, this could have been the end of his career. Rather than stop, he adapted. He rented rooms in hotels and painted the scene below from the windows, often choosing upper floors to get a broader view.

In 1897 he took a room at the Grand Hôtel de Russie in Paris, overlooking the Boulevard Montmartre, one of the busy new boulevards of the modern city. From that window he painted a series of 14 views of the same street at different times of day and in different seasons and weather: spring mornings, grey afternoons, rain, night and the crowds of the Mardi Gras carnival procession stretching into the distance. Short, loose brushstrokes suggest the constant movement of carriages and people rather than individual figures.

He did the same in Rouen, with its bridges and docks, at Le Havre and Dieppe, and in other Paris streets, and on his visits to London he again painted from hotel windows. These series, painted when he was in his late sixties and early seventies, are among the finest images of the modern city in Impressionist art. In 1992–93 an exhibition in Dallas, Philadelphia and London, The Impressionist and the City, was devoted to them.

The Boulevard Montmartre paintings are now held by museums and collectors around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. One of them, Boulevard Montmartre, Spring, has its own history: it belonged to the German Jewish industrialist Max Silberberg, was seized and sold in a forced auction before Silberberg and his wife were murdered at Auschwitz, and was restituted to his heir in 2000. When it was sold at Sotheby's in London in 2014 it fetched nearly £20 million, a record for the artist.

The series remains a model of how an artist can turn a physical limitation into new subject matter, and it left one of the most vivid records of the life and light of a late nineteenth-century city.

Why it matters

Pissarro turned a physical limitation into a new subject, leaving vivid records of the life and light of the modern city.

About Camille Pissarro

Caribbean-born Jewish painter, the ‘dean’ of Impressionism, the only artist in all eight Impressionist exhibitions and a mentor to Cézanne, Gauguin and others.

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Camille Pissarro

1830–1903 · Impressionist painting

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