Boulevard Montmartre, Spring

Boulevard Montmartre, Spring (Le Boulevard Montmartre, matinée de printemps) is an oil on canvas painted in 1897 by the French Impressionist Camille Pissarro, signed and dated 'C. Pissarro 97' at lower left; it was sold at Sotheby's London in 2014.

In 1897 Pissarro took a room at the Grand Hôtel de Russie in Paris and painted fourteen views of the Boulevard Montmartre from its window, recording the same long perspective in different weather, light and seasons, from busy spring mornings to winter, festive days and a night scene. Sotheby's catalogue notes that he worked methodically at the hotel window for more than two months, from dawn to dusk. Long celebrated as a painter of rural life, Pissarro established himself with this series and his later views of the Gare Saint-Lazare and the Tuileries as a painter of the modern city. A nearly identical spring view is in the Museum Langmatt in Baden, Switzerland.

On a canvas of 65 by 81 cm, the boulevard runs from the lower left deep into the hazy distance between rows of tall apartment buildings. Young trees in fresh leaf line the pavements, and the roadway is crowded with carriages and pedestrians rendered in quick, broken strokes under a pale, cloudy sky.

Durand-Ruel bought the picture from the artist on 2 June 1898 and exhibited it that year. By 1923 it belonged to the Breslau industrialist Max Silberberg, who was forced by the Nazi authorities to sell it at Paul Graupe's auction house in Berlin in 1935. John and Frances L. Loeb of New York acquired it in 1960 and bequeathed it to the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, in 1997. In 2000 the museum restituted it to Silberberg's heir, Gerta Silberberg, who left it on loan in Jerusalem until 2013. At Sotheby's on 5 February 2014 it sold for £19,682,500, about double its estimate.