Raising of the Belt Railway, Bel Air Station and Montempoivre Street

Raising of the Belt Railway, Bel Air Station and Montempoivre Street (Relèvement du chemin de fer de ceinture, Station du Bel Air et rue Montempoivre) is an oil on canvas by Paul Désiré Trouillebert, painted in 1888 and measuring 38.1 × 55.9 cm; it is in a private collection and was last sold at Christie's New York in 2012.

The Petite Ceinture was the circular railway built around Paris between 1852 and 1869, inside the city's fortifications, and from 1862 it also carried passengers. In the late 1880s the line on the Right Bank was rebuilt to do away with its level crossings, which meant raising the track onto embankments and bridges above the streets. At Bel-Air, in the 12th arrondissement, a new station was built during these works and opened on 16 May 1889, offering a connection with the Vincennes line. Trouillebert's picture records the site in the middle of that transformation.

Trouillebert, who trained under Ernest Hébert and Charles Jalabert, began as a portraitist and from about 1881 concentrated on landscapes, often close in manner to the late work of Corot. Around 1888 he was commissioned to paint a small series of scenes of the railway works in eastern Paris. Related canvases include the Pont de la rue de la Voûte, cours de Vincennes in the Musée d'Orsay, which belonged to Senator Edme Piot in 1888, and a view of the Cours de Vincennes bridge in the Cleveland Museum of Art, recorded as commissioned by Piot.

Here the road passes beneath a new iron railway bridge flanked by old stone houses, while at the right rises the raised station with its metal stairs. Christie's catalogue notes that a scene of this kind would have been unthinkable as a subject earlier in the century, and that the artist softened it with pale colours and a mother and child walking hand in hand in the foreground. The canvas is signed lower left and inscribed on the reverse 'La station du Bel air a la rue Montempoivre/1888'. It is catalogued in the 2004 Trouillebert catalogue raisonné as no. 213, and sold for US$22,500 on 23 April 2012.