Detail of Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning by Pissarro in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 2011

Title: The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning

Artist: Camille Pissarro (French, Charlotte Amalie, Saint Thomas 1830–1903 Paris)

Date: 1897

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 25 1/2 x 32 in. (64.8 x 81.3 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: Gift of Katrin S. Vietor, in loving memory of Ernest G. Vietor, 1960

Object Number: 60.174

After spending six years in rural Eragny, Pissarro returned to Paris, where he painted several series of the grands boulevards. Surveying the view from his lodgings at the Grand Hôtel de Russie in early 1897, Pissarro marveled that he could "see down the whole length of the boulevards" with "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 recorded—in two scenes 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.

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437310