The Seine and Louvre

Camille Pissarro's 'The Seine and Louvre' (1903) is one of his late Paris series subjects — painted from the windows of the Grand Hôtel du Louvre, his series of views across the Tuileries and the Louvre from different elevations created one of his most celebrated urban series. His engagement with the Paris cityscape from above gave him atmospheric and compositional possibilities quite different from his street-level subjects, the aerial view creating a different spatial experience and a different relationship to the city's weather and light.

Pissarro renders the Seine and Louvre view with the divisionist or post-divisionist handling of his late city subjects — the atmospheric quality of the Paris sky and the quality of light on the river and the Louvre's stone facades depicted through his characteristic broken color technique. His handling of the aerial perspective and the city's atmospheric recession creates the spatial depth of the elevated urban view. The Seine's reflective surface and the Louvre's monumental presence create the composition's formal structure.