Camille Pissarro, Paris, Rue Saint-Honoré, Sun Effect, Afternoon, 1898

Of the seven paintings by Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) in the collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Paris, Rue Saint-Honoré, Sun Effect, Afternoon is the only cityscape; the other six depict life in the Parisian suburbs. This imbalance reflects the artist’s strong preference for the countryside. For most of his five-decade career, rural motifs in the environs of Louveciennes, Éragny, and Pontoise were his chief source of inspiration. Beginning in 1893, however, Pissarro embarked on a series of urban campaigns in Paris, Rouen, Dieppe, and Le Havre at the urging of his longtime dealer Paul Durand-Ruel.¹ Instead of painting en plein air, as was his custom, he stationed his easel at upper-story hotel windows and recorded bird’s-eye views of city streets and quays. These shifts in his working method and subject matter stemmed from physical and financial circumstances. Pissarro suffered from a chronic eye infection, which required that he minimize his exposure to dust and wind.² He also depended on Durand-Ruel for his livelihood and was keen to satisfy his principal backer.³ Thus, when Durand-Ruel advised him in November 1897 to select a new Parisian quartier to paint, the artist obligingly scouted several prospective locations on the right bank.⁴

Pissarro settled on the Place du Théâtre Français, in the first arrondissement, for his next metropolitan series (Fig. 1).⁵ Known today as the Place André Malraux, this site was originally named for the state-owned theater company that performed in the adjacent Salle Richelieu of the Comédie-Française. It is situated in one of the oldest sections of Paris, just north of the Tuileries Gardens and Louvre Museum, and marks the confluence of three streets: the Rue de Richelieu, Avenue de l’Opéra, and Rue Saint-Honoré, the last of which is the focus of the Nelson-Atkins picture. In existence since the Middle Ages, the Rue Saint-Honoré has a storied history. Its earliest denizens were Catholic canons affiliated with the now-defunct Église Saint-Honoré, a collegiate church.⁶ During the Terror, Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre lived with friends on the Rue Saint-Honoré until his death by guillotine in 1794, and Marie Antoinette was conveyed to the scaffold via this street.⁷ Numerous barricades were erected along the Rue Saint-Honoré during the subsequent revolutions of 1830 and 1848, including at its intersection with the Rue de Rohan, which we glimpse in the left foreground of the Nelson-Atkins painting.⁸ When Prussians laid siege to Paris in 1870, parts of the Comédie-Française were transformed into a hospital ward.⁹ Thus, the Rue Saint-Honoré bore witness to some of the most momentous events of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet, what attracted Pissarro to this locale was not its extraordinary history but rather its modernity.

To achieve the vantage point seen in the Nelson-Atkins picture, Pissarro rented a fourth-floor suite at the Hôtel du Louvre, directly across from the Place du Théâtre Français. Founded in 1855, the hotel boasted two hundred richly furnished guestrooms and conveniences like elevators and electric lighting.¹⁰ Pissarro’s accommodations, which consisted of a bedroom, sitting room, and private bathroom, are visible in an early twentieth-century postcard of the establishment (Fig. 2). On the topmost level, three of the five casement windows opening onto the stone Juliet balcony—the ones beneath the first half of the larger Louvre sign—were part of the artist’s suite.¹¹ The standard cost of these lodgings, according to the travel guide Paris en huit jours (Paris in Eight Days; 1901), was 25 francs per night; however, Pissarro benefited from a reduced nightly rate of 18 francs for long-term visitors.¹² This expenditure was a source of anxiety for Pissarro, who was often strapped for cash, but the “superb view” delighted him.¹³

Thanks to the artist’s regular correspondence with his children, a general timeline of his Place du Théâtre Français series can be reconstructed. After spending the Christmas holiday in Éragny, Pissarro returned to Paris on January 5, 1898, and commenced work on two size-30 canvases the following day.¹⁴ He made steady progress over the next several weeks, reporting on February 22 that he had finished six pictures and begun four others—despite frequent visits from family members and colleagues and the charged political atmosphere surrounding French author Émile Zola’s trial for libel.¹⁵ In March, eye complications and bouts of bad weather hampered Pissarro, but by April 11 he had completed all fifteen paintings in the series, three of which took the Rue Saint-Honoré as their primary subject.¹⁶ Pissarro had initially intended to offload the entire group onto Durand-Ruel but ultimately reserved three cityscapes for himself. The Nelson-Atkins picture was among the dozen that he shipped to the dealer on April 26 and officially sold to him on May 2, just in time for his June retrospective.¹⁷

Although the precise order in which Pissarro executed his Place du Théâtre Français series remains speculative, a start date of early March 1898 for the Kansas City painting is supported by both meteorological observations in the artist’s extant letters and solar-mapping tools developed by Shadowmap Technologies GmbH, as discussed below. On March 7, 1898, Pissarro wrote contentedly to his son: “My work is visibly progressing, this pleases me a great deal, the lighting is so splendid, it’s a feast for the eyes!”¹⁸ His delight with the weather was short-lived, however, because two weeks later, on March 21, Pissarro mentioned to Durand-Ruel that the sun had emerged for the first time in days. Taking advantage of its return, he worked late into the afternoon on his “effect of the setting sun” picture, which Janine Bailly-Herzberg has identified as either the Nelson-Atkins scene or a privately owned painting of the Avenue de l’Opéra.¹⁹ On March 26, winter reared its head again, and Paris was blanketed with snow. Pissarro informed his wife: “I was able to finish my two snow effects. I only have three sun effects that drag on.”²⁰ The artist was still fretting about the lack of sunshine and his incomplete works on April 1, suggesting that he began Paris, Rue Saint-Honoré in early March 1898 and added the finishing touches in early April.²¹

Corroborating this epistolary evidence is Shadowmap, a sophisticated digital platform that visualizes solar shadows on interactive 3-D maps of the world and allows users to track the sun’s position anywhere on earth, at any point in time.²² In the Nelson-Atkins work, shadows engulf the foreground and three-quarters of the pedestrian island, while sunlight illuminates the Rue de l’Échelle (the nearest cross-street) and most of the central building’s southern façade. A sliver of ground shadow is also present along this edifice’s eastern side, which faces the viewer (Fig. 3). This distribution of light and shade strongly suggests mid-afternoon in early March 1898, as demonstrated by a time-lapse video of the Rue Saint-Honoré created using the Shadowmap application (Fig. 4).²³ For the purposes of this simulation, Monday, March 7, 1898—the day noted for its “splendid” lighting by Pissarro—was selected as the artist’s approximate start date, although he may have begun the Nelson-Atkins painting slightly earlier or later in the month.²⁴ Around 3 p.m. that day, the solar shadows at the Place du Théâtre Français would have corresponded closely to those seen in the Kansas City picture, confirming the timeframe of inception indicated by Pissarro’s letters.

Critics responded enthusiastically to Pissarro’s views of the Place du Théâtre Français at his June 1898 retrospective. They praised his deft handling of atmospheric light and delighted in the sheer modernity of his subject. Most of the buildings, vehicles, landscape elements, and monuments in his paintings were just a few decades old. For example, the îlot (block of houses) between the Rue de Rohan and the Rue de l’Échelle, seen at left in the Nelson-Atkins picture, dates to 1854. Designed by architect Gabriel Jean Antoine Davioud (1823–81), a colleague of Baron Haussmann (1809–91), it is emblematic of Second Empire styles, with its mansard roof and iron grillwork.²⁵ Similarly, the yellow, horse-drawn omnibus in the center-left foreground of the Kansas City painting was a fixture of nineteenth-century Paris (Fig. 5). French inventor Stanislas Baudry had launched the city’s first omnibus service in 1828, but the impériale (open top deck with half-price seating) seen here was introduced only in 1853.²⁶ Originally reserved for male passengers, the impériale became gender-integrated in the late 1880s following changes in women’s fashions and societal norms. In Paris, Rue Saint-Honoré, touches of black and gray paint mingle with dots of red and pink pigment on the vehicle’s upper deck, suggesting that male and female travelers are indeed seated together. Horse-drawn omnibuses remained in service until 1913, a decade after Pissarro’s death (Fig. 6).²⁷ In the photograph reproduced here, a customer at the rear of the vehicle climbs the spiral staircase to the impériale, which is already occupied by four men in bowler hats. Pissarro’s inclusion of this mode of transportation in Paris, Rue Saint-Honoré highlights its role in transforming Paris into a modern metropolis.²⁸

The pedestrian island in the Nelson-Atkins picture was an even more recent development. Engineer and landscape architect Jean Charles Adolphe Alphand (1817–91), head of the new Service des Promenades et Plantations (parks department) under Napoléon III, superintended the design, construction, and maintenance of Paris’s increasing number of parks, squares, and tree-lined streets, including the Place du Théâtre Français.²⁹ Alphand’s collaborators included fellow landscape architect Jean Pierre Barillet (1824–75), who sourced the trees seen in the Nelson-Atkins work from municipal nurseries near the Bois de Vincennes and Bois de Boulogne; and Davioud, who designed the fountain that those trees encircle.³⁰ The fountain is one of a pair: its sister monument flanks the east side of the Avenue de l’Opéra and appears in other paintings by Pissarro.³¹ Davioud submitted a proposal for both fountains in 1867, but the Franco-Prussian War put the project on hold, so they were not realized until 1874.³² Each one comprises a stone base, marble piedouche, and bronze effigy. A sea nymph statue by Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse (1824–87) crowns the fountain seen in the Nelson-Atkins painting, while a river nymph sculpture by Mathurin Moreau (1822–1912) caps its twin.³³ These details are somewhat obscured in Paris, Rue Saint-Honoré by the surrounding foliage and lamppost, but they are discernible in a period postcard of the square (Fig. 7).³⁴ Here, as in the Kansas City picture, the pedestrian islands facilitate a range of social encounters: people pause to enjoy the shade, chat with other passersby, and hail fiacres. Haussmann’s Paris offered many opportunities to casually meet old acquaintances and make new ones, and this aspect of modernity assumes prominence in Pissarro’s Place du Théâtre Français campaign.

Interestingly, despite Pissarro’s modern subject matter and favorable press, Durand-Ruel failed to find a buyer for the Nelson-Atkins painting for almost two decades, and the purchaser, Josef Stransky (1872–1936), returned it two months later.³⁵ However, Paris, Rue Saint-Honoré would eventually land in the very distinguished collection of actor Edward G. Robinson (né Emanuel Goldenberg, 1893–1973). Born in Romania, Robinson immigrated to the United States as a child and performed on Broadway for several years before pivoting to cinema in the 1920s.³⁶ His breakthrough role as the titular gangster in Little Caesar (1931) set him on the path to stardom and provided him with the financial means to begin collecting art. The actor initially gravitated toward American painters such as Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847–1919) and John Henry Twachtman (1853–1902) but soon acquired a taste for French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. By the 1950s, he owned no fewer than five Pissarros, three of which were Parisian cityscapes.³⁷ Robinson regarded these artworks not just as treasured possessions but as “quiet friends” whose company he cherished.³⁸ When Robinson and his first wife divorced in 1956, he was devastated to lose most of his collection in the settlement; he retained only fourteen prized pictures, including Paris, Rue Saint-Honoré.³⁹ The actor refused to part with the Nelson-Atkins picture for the rest of his life, and it even made a cameo appearance in a publicity photograph for his final film, Soylent Green (1973) (Fig. 8).⁴⁰ In Robinson’s autobiography, penned the year of his death, he pays tribute to Pissarro’s urban scenes, saying: “I think there is no Paris like Pissarro’s Paris.”⁴¹ This assessment would surely have pleased the artist, who, though a countryman at heart, made significant contributions to the genre of cityscapes.

Notes

1. Pissarro had visited Rouen once previously in 1883, but this isolated trip was suggested by his friend Claude Monet (1840–1926) rather than Durand-Ruel. See Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, “Les vues urbaines de Pissarro / Pissarro’s Urban Views,” in Camille Pissarro: Le premier des impressionnistes / The First among the Impressionists, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée Marmottan Monet, 2017), 138, 144.

2. Pissarro’s doctor prescribed silver nitrate eye drops to mitigate his inflammation and pus. See Camille Pissarro to Dr. Parenteau, February 13, 1897, and Camille Pissarro to Lucien Pissarro, November 22, 1897, in Janine Bailly-Herzberg, ed., Correspondance de Camille Pissarro (Paris: Valhermeil, 1989), 4:327, 409–10, letter nos. 1370, 1477.

3. Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, “Les vues urbaines de Pissarro,” 165, 170.

4. See Camille Pissarro to Lucien Pissarro, November 9, 1897, in Bailly-Herzberg, Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, 4:396, no. 1462.

5. Pissarro’s previous Parisian campaigns had centered on the Gare Saint-Lazare in the eighth arrondissement (1893 and 1897) and Montmartre in the eighteenth arrondissement (1897).

6. This thirteenth-century church was nationalized in 1789 and largely demolished in 1792; the surviving remnants were destroyed in 1854. See Robert Hénard, La Rue Saint-Honoré de la Révolution à nos jours (Paris: Émile-Paul, 1909), 463. Today, the Ministère de la Culture building occupies the church’s former site.

7. Hénard, La Rue Saint-Honoré, 141–42, 147–49.

8. Hénard, La Rue Saint-Honoré, 415. The corner café with the red-and-white striped awning in the Nelson-Atkins work marks this intersection. For a period illustration of one such barricade, see Richard, 28 Juillet 1830. Première barricade, Rue Saint Honoré, lithograph, 8 1/8 x 11 13/16 in. (20.6 x 30 cm), Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b540007880.

9. Hénard, La Rue Saint-Honoré, 503. The Comédie-Française is not visible in the Nelson-Atkins picture but appears in several other works from the same series, such as Camille Pissarro, Place du Théâtre Français, 1898, oil on canvas, 29 x 36 in. (73.7 x 91.4 cm), Minneapolis Institute of Art, 18.19.

10. The hotel switched from gas to electric lighting prior to 1894. See Henri Maréchal, L’Éclairage à Paris: Étude technique des divers modes d’éclairage employés à Paris (Paris: Librairie polytechnique Baudry et Cie, 1894), 366–67.

11. This sign has since been removed from the building. Only the smaller Hôtel du Louvre sign remains today.

12. Paris en huit jours: Guide offert par le Grand Hôtel Terminus de la Gare Saint-Lazare (Paris: P. Mouillot, [1901]), 36. For Pissarro’s rate, see Camille Pissarro to Lucien Pissarro, January 8, 1898, in Bailly-Herzberg, Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, 4:427, no. 1494.

13. See Camille Pissarro to Lucien Pissarro, December 15 and 21, 1897, in Bailly-Herzberg, Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, 4:417–20, nos. 1489–90. In the latter, Pissarro states: “Je vais avoir des frais considérables, mais Durand a l’air de m’y encourager” (“My costs will be substantial, but Durand seems like he will help me”).

14. Camille Pissarro to Lucien Pissarro, January 6, 1898, in Bailly-Herzberg, Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, 4:425–26, no. 1493.

15. Camille Pissarro to Lucien Pissarro, February 22, 1898, in Bailly-Herzberg, Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, 4:453–54, no. 1518. Pissarro’s visitors during those first six weeks included his wife, Julie (January 10–13 and February 6–9), his son Georges (third week of February), and the painter Hippolyte Petitjean (1854–1929) (January 24). He followed Zola’s trial (February 7–23) closely and often discussed the Dreyfus affair in his correspondence.

16. See Camille Pissarro to Julie Pissarro, March 5, 1898; Camille Pissarro to Lucien Pissarro, March 7, 1898; and Camille Pissarro to Lucien Pissarro, April 11, 1898, in Bailly-Herzberg, Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, 4:456–59, 469–70, nos. 1521, 1523, 1534.

17. See Camille Pissarro to Paul Durand-Ruel, April 25, 1898; and Camille Pissarro to Lucien Pissarro, April 26, 1898, in Bailly-Herzberg, Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, 4:475–77, nos. 1539–1540. Pissarro’s retrospective was on view from June 1 to 18, 1898, at the Galeries Durand-Ruel.

18. Camille Pissarro to Lucien Pissarro, March 7, 1898, in Bailly-Herzberg, Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, 4:457, no. 1523. “Mon travail avance à vue d’œil, cela m’amuse énormément, les lumières sont si splendides, c’est une fête des yeux!” Emphasis added.

19. Camille Pissarro to Paul Durand-Ruel, March 21, 1898, in Bailly-Herzberg, Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, 4:461, no. 1526. Pissarro stated: “Je comptais passer rue Lafitte, mais je suis retenu par mon ‘effet de soleil couchant’ assez tard” (“I had intended to stop by the rue Lafitte, but my ‘effect of the setting sun’ kept me [at the hotel] quite late”).

20. Camille Pissarro to Julie Pissarro, March 26, 1898, in Bailly-Herzberg, Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, 4:463, no. 1528. “J’ai pu finir mes deux effets de neige. Je n’ai plus que trois effets de soleil qui traînent en longueur.”

21. Camille Pissarro to Lucien Pissarro, April 1, 1898, in Bailly-Herzberg, Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, 4:467, no. 1531.

22. Shadowmap combines data from OpenStreetMap (OSM) and SunCalc to create maps with realistic buildings and solar shadows. Buildings are plotted as blocks, meaning the application does not account for sloped roofs when projecting shadows. See https://shadowmap.org for further details. I thank Simon Mulser, cofounder of Shadowmap, for his kind assistance with this project.

23. According to descendants of Pissarro’s dealer, the Nelson-Atkins picture is listed as Paris, rue Saint-Honoré, effet de soleil, matin (Paris, Rue Saint-Honoré, Sun Effect, Morning) in Durand-Ruel’s stockbooks. See Paul-Louis Durand-Ruel and Flavie Durand-Ruel to Nicole Myers, NAMA, January 11, 2016, NAMA curatorial files. It seems that Durand-Ruel confused the Kansas City picture with another painting of the Rue Saint-Honoré in the collection of Ordrupgaard in Charlottenlund, Denmark, which depicts a morning scene.

24. Scientists at the Montsouris Observatory in Paris recorded a sunrise of 6:32 a.m. and a sunset of 5:51 p.m. on March 7, 1898. See Annuaire de l’Observatoire municipal de Montsouris pour l’année 1898 (Paris: Gauthier-Villars et fils, 1898), 7. Paris operates on Central European Time (CET) today, but in 1898 the city still privileged the Paris meridian over the Greenwich meridian, which meant that their time zone was 9 minutes and 21 seconds behind Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). See Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870–1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 38–41. The Shadowmap video accounts for this historical zone and reflects local time in Paris.

25. For Davioud’s original sketch of the îlot, see Gabriel Jean Antoine Davioud, “Rue Saint-Honoré 255–257,” in “Expropriations de 1852–1854 pour le prolongement de la rue de Rivoli [Recueil de dessins],” vol. 2, fol. 38, Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, CP 3369.

26. Masha Belenky, Engine of Modernity: The Omnibus and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 15–18. A deck seat cost fifteen centimes, whereas an enclosed seat cost thirty centimes.

27. Belenky, Engine of Modernity, 20–22.

28. By 1878, the demand for public transport was such that La Compagnie générale des omnibus added a forty-passenger vehicle to its fleet. Nevertheless, overcrowding remained a problem, which Pissarro experienced firsthand. As he related in one letter: “Je voulais aller aujourd’hui dimanche à la recherche de motifs à Passy et Trocadéro, mais il y a un tel monde aux omnibus à cause du beau soleil que j’y renonce.” See Camille Pissarro to Georges Pissarro, November 14, 1897, in Bailly-Herzberg, Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, 4:403, no. 1468.

29. For Alphand’s life and career, see Gideon Fink Shapiro, “The Promenades of Paris: Alphand and the Urbanization of Garden Art, 1852–1871” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2015). Alphand expounded his approach to urban landscape design in Jean Charles Adolphe Alphand, Les Promenades de Paris: Bois de Boulogne, Bois de Vincennes, parcs, squares, boulevards (Paris: J. Rothschild, 1867–1873).

30. The trees were carefully pruned so that their leaves did not obstruct the streetlamps. Alphand’s guidelines specified that all foliage be 3.5 meters or higher above the ground. Alphand further required that all tree roots be covered by iron grilles, though Pissarro opted to omit these grates from the Nelson-Atkins picture. See Shapiro, “The Promenades of Paris,” 60–61, 213–15.

31. See Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro: Catalogue critique des peintures / Critical Catalogue of Paintings, trans. Mark Hutchinson and Michael Taylor (Paris: Wildenstein Institute, 2005), nos. 1195, 1197–98, 1201–08, pp. 3:749–55.

32. Gabriel Davioud, architecte (1824–1881), exh. cat. (Alençon, France: Firmin-Didot, 1981), 49.

33. For Carrier-Belleuse’s involvement in the sculptural program, see June Ellen Hargrove, “The Life and Work of Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse” (PhD diss., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1976), 165–66.

34. The lamppost is also Davioud’s handiwork: he designed this candélabre ordinaire (single, branchless streetlamp) and several other models. See Alphand, Les Promenades de Paris, unnumbered and unpaginated plate titled “Voie publique candélabres.”

35. Stransky, a conductor for the New York Philharmonic, purchased Paris, Rue Saint-Honoré from Durand-Ruel on February 20, 1917, and returned it on April 20, 1917.

36. Robinson’s first silent film was The Bright Shawl (1923), and his first talkie was The Hole in the Wall (1929). Michael Frank, “Edward G. Robinson: Sterling Collection for the Star of Little Caesar and Double Indemnity,” Architectural Digest 47, no. 4 (April 1990): 181.

37. See The Gladys Lloyd Robinson and Edward G. Robinson Collection, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum, 1956), nos. 39–43.

38. Robinson once remarked of his collection: “Sometimes late at night, when the house is quiet, and the last guest has gone, I go into my living room and sit down among these quiet friends, and we study each other very gravely, and I hope with mutual pleasure.” Jane Robinson, Edward G. Robinson’s World of Art (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 116.

39. Robinson paid his ex-wife one-half the insurance value of those fourteen artworks. See Roland Balaÿ to Edward G. Robinson, January 18, 1957, M. Knoedler and Co. Records, approximately 1848–1971, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2012.M.54, Series VI, Box 985, Folder 5.

40. I am grateful to Danielle Hampton Cullen, project assistant, NAMA, for this discovery.

41. Edward G. Robinson and Leonard Spigelgass, All My Yesterdays: An Autobiography (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973), 15.

The painting is executed on extremely fine, plain-weave canvas that has been glue-lined to a slightly coarser fabric. At an unknown date, the original stretcher or strainer was replaced with a six-membered stretcher that has one vertical and one horizontal crossbar.¹ While the original secondary support has been lost, the tacking margins remain intact. Cusping associated with the original, empty tack holes indicates the painting has never been cropped (Fig. 9).² The overall dimensions correspond to a no. 15 figure standard-format canvas (65 x 54 cm),³ and a stenciled stamp on the reverse identifies the supplier as P. Contet.⁴ Although obscured by the lining, the stamp was revealed using transmitted infrared imaging (Fig. 10). The presence of the stamp, along with the fact that the ground extends over the tacking margins and under the original tack heads, suggests the canvas was commercially primed prior to stretching.

The bright white ground was brush-applied, and streaky brushstrokes are visible through the paint layers (Fig. 11). The stamp’s precise placement at the lower center (oriented upside-down relative to the painting at recto) suggests that Contet stretched the primed canvas and stenciled it afterward.⁵ For Contet to have accessed this area, which is now located beneath the vertical crossbar, the original stretcher or strainer must have consisted of four or five members. Alternatively, Pissarro may have ordered the canvas in a standard no. 15 figure size, already primed and stenciled, and stretched it himself.⁶

The artist executed an unusually extensive underdrawing, likely necessitated by the complexity and rigidity of the urban architecture.⁷ Using a dry, black medium (Fig. 12), Pissarro mapped the perspective of the street, spacing between windows, and contours of the buildings and fountain (Fig. 13). The long gridlines in the building at right were likely achieved with a straight edge or another drafting tool. He adhered closely to his sketch when painting, only deviating from the plan by introducing elements that were not included in the underdrawing at all.

As was his typical practice, Pissarro blocked in the major forms, leaving reserves of exposed ground between them (Fig. 14).⁸ Then, he rapidly and confidently built up the layers with saturated, jewel-like hues (Fig. 15). Regarding the series as a whole, he wrote, “I am having great fun, the light is so splendid—it’s a feast for the eyes,”⁹ and his joyfulness shows. Broad, gestural strokes of vibrant colors swirl together wet-into-wet, but the result is controlled, legible, and masterful. Once the paint had started to dry, he introduced additional paint layers, thin paint strokes, and drybrushing to refine the color and texture within the crowds and sunlit facades (Fig. 16).

In a subsequent session, he reworked parts of the sky and street, possibly to adjust the atmospheric effects and shadows (Fig. 17). He seems to have added the pedestrian refuge island at this stage, as it was neither underdrawn nor left in reserve (see Figs. 13 and 14). The island (and the lamppost on it) does not appear in the closely related paintings, Rue Saint-Honoré, Morning, Effect of Sunlight (1898; Ordrupgaard, Charlottenlund) and Rue Saint-Honoré, Afternoon, Effect of Rain (1897; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid), but it is visible in broader views of the place du Théâtre-Français and at the far left of Figure 7.¹⁰ The island was integrated into the composition by repainting a large section of the street wet-into-wet over earlier, dried paint (Fig. 18). Although he exerted such effort to include the large lamppost, Pissarro omitted the smaller candelabra lamps around the fountain, which appear in the Madrid painting (Fig. 19) and postcard in Figure 7.¹¹

After the reworkings dried, Pissarro painted the lamppost on the island and over the fountain (Fig. 20). The vehicles, groups of people in the foreground, and trees were also painted wet-over-dry, but they were not afterthoughts. Unlike the lamppost, these elements were never omitted and appear in all fifteen paintings in the series. The bustling carts and people were integral to the animated spirit of his cityscapes, and he likely painted them last to capture the spontaneity and immediacy of the scene. Minor later adjustments include the removal of the last row of passengers in the omnibus, now visible as a pentimento (see Fig. 5).

Pissarro signed and dated the painting at the lower right corner. The “8” in “98” seems to have been changed from a 7 (Fig. 21). The construction of his dates and numbers is not consistent across his works, so the discrepancy might have no significance. However, Pissarro had rented his hotel room in December of 1897 and produced at least two works before the new year. The Madrid painting and Place du Théâtre-Français and the Avenue de l’Opéra, Fog (Dallas Museum of Art) are both dated 97. Perhaps the Nelson-Atkins painting was painted on the cusp of the new year, leading to momentary confusion when writing the date, and then reworked closer to springtime when the leaves were beginning to emerge.¹² The heavily worked treetops make it difficult to determine whether foliage was added wet-over-dry at a later stage (Fig. 22).

The provenance of the painting is well documented, but its conservation history is sparse. Residue of a natural resin varnish—likely not original as Pissarro disapproved of varnishing—is still present in the interstices of the paint and at the tacking margins.¹³ The absence of varnish beneath the original tack heads indicates that the coating predates tack removal and lining (see Fig. 9), which occurred sometime before 1982.¹⁴ A 1982 report records a “recent” cleaning, probably removal of the natural resin, and the subsequent application of a synthetic varnish. By 1986, this coating already appeared “milky” and was removed.¹⁵ The painting was revarnished with different synthetic resins that are still on the surface today. Retouching is minimal and confined to the perimeter and a small area of roof near the right edge.

Notes

1. In 1983, most of the early labels were removed from the replacement stretcher and attached to the backing board. The labels that were too fragile to remove were left in place. See Forrest Bailey, December 30, 1982 to January 4, 1983, treatment summary, NAMA conservation file, 2015.13.18.

2. Two sets of tacks are currently present: one associated with the lining fabric and the other with the original canvas. The original tacks, represented by their empty holes, were spaced 5.4 to 6.4 cm apart and had heads measuring 0.6 cm in diameter. Empty staple holes relate to edge stripping that was added in the 1980s and removed at a later date. See Bailey, 1982–83, treatment summary, NAMA conservation file, 2015.13.18.

3. See the list of canvas sizes offered by the Bourgeois Ainé company in 1888, reproduced in Iris Schaefer, Caroline von Saint-George, and Katja Lewerentz, Painting Light: The Hidden Techniques of the Impressionists (Milan: Skira, 2008), 50.

4. The stamp reads, “TOILES à PEINDRE à COULEURS FINE / P. CONTET / PARIS / 34, Rue Lafayette, 34.”

5. Pissarro’s use of a similar brush-applied ground that was likely prepared by Contet is noted in Kelly Keegan, “Cat. 12, Haymaking at Éragny, 1892: Technical Report,” in Pissarro Paintings and Works on Paper at the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2015), para 23, figs. 12.20–12.22, https://publications.artic.edu/pissarro/reader/paintingsandpaper/section/24.

6. Pissarro occasionally stretched both bare and pre-primed canvas on standard-format stretchers that he already had. See Alex Chipkin, “Inspiration, Collaboration, and Evolution: The Painting Techniques of Camille Pissarro and his Sons,” Paintings by the Pissarro Family: A Technical Catalogue (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, 2024), para 31, https://pissarro.discovernewfields.org/inspiration-collaboration-and-evolution-the-painting-techniques-of-camille-pissarro-and-his-sons; Lydia Gutierrez and Aviva Burnstock, “Technical Examination of Works by Camille and Lucien Pissarro from the Courtauld Gallery,” Art Matters 5 (2013): 16, https://www.amjournal.org/_files/ugd/14a82d_1cd5fda55c9d4cdbb5cf6168377f1fd2.pdf; and letter from Camille to Lucien Pissarro, February 18, 1897, in Camille Pissarro: Letters to his Son Lucien, ed. and trans. John Rewald (New York: Pantheon Books, 1943), 307.

7. Regarding a similar series of urban views on the Boulevard Montmarte, Pissarro wrote, “I have a stunning motif that will require every conceivable effort to interpret. On my left, I have another motif, but it’s terribly difficult, almost a bird’s-eye view of carriages, omnibuses, people between big trees, big houses that have to be set straight, it’s hard!” Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro: Catalogue critique des peintures / Critical Catalogue of Paintings, trans. Mark Hutchinson and Michael Taylor (Paris: Wildenstein Institute, 2005), 3:728.

8. See Becca Goodman “Camille Pissarro, Chestnut Grove at Louveciennes, 1872,” technical entry in this catalogue, 2025; Gutierrez and Burnstock, “Technical Examination of Works,” 20; and Alex Chipkin and Laura Mosteller, “Woman Washing Her Feet in a Brook, 1894: Technical Examination,” Paintings by the Pissarro Family, https://pissarro.discovernewfields.org/technical-reports/48.17/.

9. Camille to Lucien Pissarro, March 7, 1898, cited and translated in Richard R. Brettell and Joachim Pissarro, The Impressionist and the City: Pissarro’s Series Paintings, exh. cat. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 82.

10. See, for example, Avenue de l’Opéra: Morning Sunshine (1898; Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Avenue de l’Opera, Effect of Snow (1898; Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow).

11. If the candelabra lampposts were painted and then later omitted, they must have been fully scraped off, as there is no evidence of them under magnification or with any imaging technique.

12. Pissarro is suspected to have added leaves to the trees of another painting in the series, Place du Théâtre-Français, the Omnibuses, Spring, Sunlight (1898; State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg) in a later reworking. Pissarro and Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro: Critical Catalogue of Paintings, 3:756.

13. By the 1880s, it was clear that Pissarro opposed varnish. On the verso of Landscape at Chaponval (1880; Musée d’Orsay), he wrote on a label: “Veuillez ne pas vernir ce tableau. C. Pissarro” (Please do not varnish this picture. C. Pissarro). See David Bomford, Jo Kirby, John Leighton, and Ashok Roy, Art in the Making: Impressionism (London: Yale University Press, 1991), 101; Michael Swicklick, “French Painting and the Use of Varnish, 1750–1900,” Conservation Research: Studies in the History of Art 41, no. 2 (1993): 168–69; Anthea Callen, “The Unvarnished Truth: Mattness, ‘Primitivism,’ and Modernity in French Painting, c. 1870–1907,” Burlington Magazine 136, no. 1100 (November 1994): 738.

14. The painting was already lined when Forrest Bailey examined it. See Bailey, 1982–1983, treatment summary, NAMA conservation file, 2015.13.18.

15. Forrest Bailey, January 14, 1986, treatment report, NAMA conservation file, 2015.13.18.