Boulevard des Italiens, Morning, Sunlight

Boulevard des Italiens, Morning, Sunlight of 1897 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington was painted from the upper floors of the Grand Hôtel du Louvre, where Pissarro rented rooms specifically for their elevated views over the adjacent boulevards. The canvas is among the most celebrated in his entire urban series, combining the technical brilliance of his mature broken-colour technique with a panoramic view that captures Paris at the moment of maximum modernity — the Haussmann boulevards, the electric streetlamps, the morning commercial activity of a city at the height of its Belle Époque confidence. The influence of Japanese woodblock prints, whose bird's-eye urban perspectives had shaped the entire Impressionist generation, is visible in the compressed spatial depth and the bird's-eye flattening of the boulevard surface. The NGA's holding of this magnificent canvas places it alongside other great urban Impressionist paintings — Monet's Paris views, Caillebotte's rain-swept boulevards — within the context of the movement's sustained engagement with the modern city as a pictorial subject.

Pissarro builds the boulevard's bustle through hundreds of small, varied strokes — individual figures suggested by two or three marks, carriages by dark horizontal accents. The overall effect is of optical vibration rather than descriptive detail. The morning sunlight is rendered in warm golds and creams against the cool blue shadows of buildings.