The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning

After spending six years painting in the rural setting of Éragny, Pissarro returned to Paris, where he produced several series of the "Grands Boulevards." As Pissarro surveyed the view from his lodgings at the Grand Hôtel de Russie in early 1897, he marveled that not only could he "see down the whole length of the boulevards" but he had "almost a bird's-eye view of carriages, omnibuses, people, between big trees, big houses that have to be set straight." From February through April, he set out to record—in two views of the Boulevard des Italiens to the right, and fourteen of the Boulevard Montmartre to the left—the spectacle of urban life as it unfolded below his window.