Boulevard des Capucines

Boulevard des Capucines is an oil-on-canvas painting by Claude Monet, dated 1873–1874, showing the crowded Paris boulevard from above in winter; it is in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (object number F72-35).

Monet painted two views of the boulevard from the same vantage point, the premises of the photographer Nadar, whose rooms on the corner of the boulevard des Capucines gave him a plunging view of the street. The two canvases share the same dimensions turned through ninety degrees: the horizontal one is in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, and this vertical one, 80.3 by 60.3 cm, is number 293 in Daniel Wildenstein's catalogue raisonné. The picture was made in the months when Monet and his colleagues were organising the independent exhibition that opened in Nadar's former studio in April 1874.

The museum's label calls the work a summary of classic Impressionism: a modern urban subject, light pastel colour, broken brushwork that suggests movement, attention to light and atmosphere, and a sketch-like surface presented as a finished picture. Tall buildings line the left side, a row of bare trees runs down the centre with cabs waiting beneath, and the snowy pavement is filled with small dark strokes standing for pedestrians. A figure at lower right carries a bunch of pink balloons, and top-hatted onlookers lean from a balcony at the right edge.

A similar version was shown at the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, where it found admirers but also mockery; the critic Louis Leroy, in his satirical review in Le Charivari, asked what the little black marks at the bottom were meant to be. This canvas was bought from Monet in 1875 by Charles Vaillant de Meixmoron de Dombasle, later passed through Bernheim-Jeune, Alex Reid and Knoedler, and entered the Nelson-Atkins through the Kenneth A. and Helen F. Spencer Foundation Acquisition Fund. It was lent to the exhibition Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment at the Musée d'Orsay and the National Gallery of Art in 2024–2025.