Camille Pissarro
This gorgeous depiction of Paris set in 1897 was painted by the French Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. He combined an incredible blue-black sky, beautifully lined buildings vanishing into a distant point and a road lit by street lights to create this Impressionist masterpiece. It is titled The Boulevard Montmartre at Night.
Towards the end of his life Pissarro increasingly turned to the representation of town scenes in Paris, Rouen, Dieppe, Le Havre and London, mainly painted from the windows of hotels and apartments. In February 1897 he took a room in Paris at the Hôtel de Russie on the corner of the Boulevard des Italiens and the Rue Drouot and produced a series of paintings of the Boulevard Montmartre at different times of the day and this depiction is the only night scene in the series. This painting then is not simply a Parisian street, but is in reality an impression of the street and all the elements in it.
After the famous renovation of Paris by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who restructured the city and created the magnificent wide boulevards we know and love today, artists developed a penchant for showing the city in its glorious new incarnation. Pissarro may have been influenced by Monet’s series of paintings (such as his Haystacks and Rouen Cathedral works) and by the earlier urban scenes of Manet.