The Boulevard des Capucines in Paris

What you are looking at

We look down from a high window onto one of the great boulevards of Paris. A row of plane trees, bare but for a haze of orange and gold twigs, runs diagonally across the canvas from the lower left toward the distance. Beneath them a dense crowd moves along the pavement and the roadway: hundreds of figures, each just a dark dab or a vertical flick of paint, with spots of red and the black boxes of cabs and omnibuses. Above, the pale stone façades of the buildings opposite catch a low, warm sun along their cornices.

At the far right edge, cut off by the frame, two men in top hats lean out from a balcony, watching the same scene we are. Below them a striped awning slants into the picture. The sky at upper right is a pale, smoky blue that softens toward the end of the boulevard, where the crowd dissolves into light.

Claude Monet painted this view of the Boulevard des Capucines in 1873 and signed and dated it at lower left. It measures about 61 by 80 centimeters, is number 292 in Wildenstein's catalogue, and is in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

Where and when

Monet painted from the upper floor of 35 Boulevard des Capucines, the building used as a studio by the photographer Nadar, near the Opéra. In April 1874 the same rooms housed the first exhibition of the Société anonyme des artistes, the group that would soon be called the Impressionists. A view of the boulevard hung in that show, and visitors could step from the painting to the window and see the motif.

There are two versions. This horizontal canvas is in Moscow; an upright one, dated 1873–74, is in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City: see Boulevard des Capucines. Which of the two was exhibited in 1874 is still debated. The Moscow picture, with its bare trees and low winter sun, seems to record a different season and time of day.

The critic Louis Leroy, in the satirical review in Le Charivari that gave the Impressionists their name, mocked the crowd in the boulevard picture as "innumerable black tongue-lickings." He meant it as an insult; it is a fair description of the technique.

How it was painted

Monet's figures are not people but movement. Each is a few strokes, and the crowd thickens into a dark, flickering mass as it recedes. That is how a busy street actually looks from above, and how it looks in a photograph with a slow shutter, a comparison that Nadar's address makes hard to ignore.

Look at the trees. Monet paints their twigs as a warm veil of orange, pink and ochre strokes laid over the façades behind, so the buildings glow through them. The pavement is a pale violet-grey, the shadows are blue, and small accents of red are scattered through the crowd to keep the eye moving.

The two spectators at the right are the only figures with any detail. They are our stand-ins, and they turn the picture into a painting about looking at the modern city, a subject Impressionism would make its own.

The motif and its siblings

Monet painted the city from above throughout the 1860s and 1870s: from the Louvre in 1867, in The Church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois and The Garden of the Infanta; from a window over the Pont Neuf in Le Pont Neuf the same year as this picture; and from a balcony over the flag-filled streets of 1878 in Rue Montorgueil. The 1874 exhibition that began in this building also showed Impression, Sunrise.

Where to see it

The canvas is in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, whose French paintings come largely from the pre-revolutionary collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. For museums worldwide, see where to see Monet's paintings, and for the artist, Claude Monet.