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This painting belongs to a series of fifteen works which Pissarro painted from the window of his Paris hotel on the Place du Théâtre Français during the winter of 1897 to 1898. Pissarro, who had almost always lived outside Paris and who was basically a landscape painter and one of the first to consistently paint out of doors, was obliged to live in the city at the end of his life for reasons of health. It was then that he started painting views seen from windows, capturing the life of the streets in cities such as Paris or Rouen. Stylistically, the work from the last decade of his life coincides with a return to an Impressionist technique after a period in which he had experimented with an approach close to Seurat.
Pissarro worked painstakingly on this cycle of Paris street views, no doubt inspired by Durand Ruel's promise that he would show them in his gallery. He painted every view available from his hotel room -the rue St Honoré, the Avenue de l'Opera and the Place de l'Opera next to his hotel- and then painted them again under different lighting conditions. Pissarro selected one of the new urban landscapes created during the Second Empire (1852-1870) by Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann, who had controversially transformed Paris into a modern city, crossed by wide avenues which allowed for long perspectives across its different axes.
The pictorial model for an urban view painted from a high viewpoint had been established by Monet in his two famous canvases of the Boulevard des Capucines which were shown in the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874. Painted one year earlier from the window of Nadar's studio, Monet created in them a lasting image of the hustle and bustle of the city.
In the three paintings of the rue St Honoré, Pissarro creates a perspectival view of this street with the corner of the Place du Théâtre Français in the foreground. In the present painting the view is painted in early afternoon, just after rain, with a few drops still falling and some pedestrians still using their umbrellas. In another version (now in the Ordrupgaard Museum, Copenhagen) the scene is set in a strong morning sunlight, while in a third version (in a private collection) the city is in shadow in the dim light of dusk.
The high viewpoint, which took in the city's new buildings, gave the composition an air of casualness and a more natural look which was in keeping with the Impressionist's desire to paint real life subjects. The high viewpoint was also a device used by Pissarro to distance himself from the scene. The artist used this format for urban themes in contrast with his landscapes which were painted from a closer view point. He would use these different treatments to express the contrast between the life of the city and that of the country. We should bear in mind that these last works by Pissarro coincide with the increased radicalism of his ideology which was gradually coming closer to the Anarchist movement. In line with his political ideas, rural life is depicted as a harmonious style of life and as the representation of a new Arcadia. Faced with the city Pissarro instead adopted a certain attitude of distance and takes on the role of the Baudelairean flâneur.With his magnificent powers of observation, Pissarro creates a pictorial evocation of the new type of life of the city: "my ideas are perhaps not very aesthetic but I am happy to paint these Paris streets which people often think have no character. They are very different, very modern." The relationship between the modernisation of Paris completed under Napoleon III and the new Impressionist painting achieves its finest representation in this painting.
Paloma Alarcó
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