Camille Pissarro and the city series of the late 1890s

By the middle of the 1890s Camille Pissarro could not reliably work outdoors. A recurring infection of the tear duct made wind and dust dangerous for him, and any long spell in the open cost him weeks of vision. He was in his sixties, he had a family to support, and painting outside had been his method for thirty years. The solution he found was to rent a room with a good window.

It worked better than a compromise has any right to. Between 1896 and his death in 1903 he produced series of Rouen, of the Paris boulevards, of the Tuileries, of the bridges and the Place Dauphine, and of the port at Le Havre. Each series takes one fixed viewpoint and works through weather, season and hour. It is the largest coherent body of work he ever made.

How the rooms were chosen

He rented by the view rather than by the address. In Rouen he took rooms at the Hotel de Paris and later the Hotel d Angleterre, both looking over the quays and the bridges. In Paris he worked from the Hotel de Russie at the corner of the Boulevard Montmartre, then from the Hotel du Louvre for the Avenue de l Opera, then from an apartment on the Rue de Rivoli for the Tuileries. He wrote to his son Lucien about the light in each one before he signed anything.

The method was systematic. Several canvases stood ready at once, and he moved between them as conditions changed, so a grey morning went on one and a wet afternoon on another. That is why the series read as a set rather than as repetitions. He was not painting the boulevard, he was painting the difference between one boulevard and the same boulevard an hour later.

Durand-Ruel was his dealer and had been, on and off, since the 1870s. The series suited a dealer very well: a group of pictures with a shared subject fills a gallery, invites comparison and sells as a body. Monet had already proved the point with his own series in the same decade. Pissarro was the least commercially successful of the original impressionist group for most of his life, and the city pictures are what finally changed that.

• The Rouen campaigns run through 1896 and 1898 and are the earliest of the window series
• The Boulevard Montmartre group was painted in the winter and spring of 1897
• The Avenue de l Opera and Place du Theatre Francais views come from the Hotel du Louvre
• Tuileries views were painted from an apartment on the Rue de Rivoli around 1899 and 1900
• The Pont-Neuf and Place Dauphine group came last, from rooms on the Ile de la Cite
• Le Havre was the final campaign, painted in the summer before his death in 1903

For buyers the series structure has a practical consequence. Within any group the pictures are not equal, and the market has sorted them by weather and by crowd rather than by date. Snow, rain and heavy traffic sell above clear empty mornings, sometimes by a wide margin. That preference has been stable for a long time and is worth knowing before you read an estimate as a valuation.

Where to see them

The series are scattered by design, since Durand-Ruel sold them into different collections rather than keeping any group together. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Musee d Orsay all hold examples, and the Art Institute collection is a reasonable place to start comparing versions. Seeing two from one series side by side tells you more about the method than any single canvas can.

A view painted forty times from the same window is a record of attention rather than of a place, and that is the reason the weak canvases in a series still tell you something.

LaArt editorial note

Pissarro died in Paris on 13 November 1903, six months after Gauguin, who had been his student in the 1870s. The window pictures were finished work rather than a late compromise, and he seems to have known it. An eye complaint took away his method and he built another one out of a rented room.