Impressionism · 1897
Camille Pissarro 1830–1903
National Gallery · London
From a hotel window Pissarro paints the wet Paris boulevard at night, ablaze with the new electric light.
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Chapter 1 of 7
You are looking down onto the Boulevard Montmartre in 1897, just as Camille Pissarro saw it from his rented room at the Grand Hotel de Russie. At sixty-seven, nearly blind in one eye, he pressed his easel to the window and spent weeks capturing the same street across every season and hour. This is the only nocturne in the series — and the most electric.
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