Highway of Combs-la-Ville

Highway of Combs-la-Ville, painted on canvas in 1873 and held in the George W. Elkins Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, shows Boldini engaging with the French landscape beyond the Parisian urban context. Combs-la-Ville, a town southeast of Paris, offered the kind of rural highway scene — a road receding into distance, flanked by trees or buildings — that formed a standard subject in the emerging plein-air tradition Boldini was absorbing from his French contemporaries. The highway or road as a compositional device provided a natural perspective recession and could be populated with figures, carts, or animals to create a scene of everyday French provincial life. The 1873 date makes this contemporary with his café, street, and genre scenes from the same period, all part of Boldini's comprehensive exploration of French subjects in his early Paris years. The Elkins Collection provenance places this work within the tradition of American acquisition of French and Italian academic and Impressionist-adjacent painting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The highway's linear recession organises the composition's depth, with the road surface itself becoming a major pictorial element. Boldini handles the road's surface — whether dirt, cobblestone, or macadam — through horizontal and diagonal strokes that suggest perspective recession. Flanking vegetation or buildings are painted with looser brushwork than any foreground figures, creating a conventional but effective depth hierarchy.