The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning

The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning is an oil on canvas painted by Camille Pissarro in 1897, part of his series of fourteen views of the Paris boulevard; it belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Pissarro was then in his late sixties and best known for rural scenes painted around Pontoise and Éragny, but an eye condition made working outdoors increasingly difficult. In February 1897 he took a large room at the Grand Hôtel de Russie, 1 rue Drouot, on the corner of the Boulevard des Italiens, from which he could look along the Boulevard Montmartre. The dealer Paul Durand-Ruel had suggested a series of the boulevards, and Pissarro, writing to his son Lucien, noted the market for series of the kind Monet had made with his Haystacks. From that window he painted the same street in snow, rain, fog, mist and sunshine, and at different times of day.

In this winter version the boulevard bends gently to the left towards a vanishing point in the upper left third of the canvas. Carriages, omnibuses and pedestrians fill the roadway, while kiosks and advertising columns line the pavements and a row of street lamps runs down the middle. The young plane trees are a reminder that the boulevard was part of the city's mid-century reconstruction. A pale, lightly clouded sky spreads an even, diffuse light over the scene. By this date Pissarro had moved away from the methodical pointillist technique he had earlier adopted from Georges Seurat.

The canvas measures 64.8 by 81.3 cm and is signed and dated at lower left. Katrin S. Vietor gave it to the Met in 1960 in loving memory of Ernest G. Vietor.