Painting Detail
Place du Theatre-Francais. SpringArtist: Camille Pissarro
Medium: Painting, Oil on canvas, 65.5x81.5 cm
Date: 1898
Genre: Cityscape, Landscape
Source: State Museum of New Western Art, Moscow, 1930
Here Pissarro depicted that part of Paris near the Comedie Francaise, although the theatre building itself remains outside the painting. The artist was interested not in famous views, but in the everyday life of the city itself, such as the stop for horse-drawn trams in the foreground.
With free, clearly differentiated strokes, the artist captures the traffic and tiny human figures, the fresh spring leaves of the trees. He manages to convey the atmosphere and the sunlight, giving the city a vivid charm.
Like Claude Monet, Pissarro painted series of pictures of one and the same urban scene in a variety of very different weathers and conditions; in his case he took Paris as his main theme. The Hermitage canvas is from one such cycle of works, painted in a rented room in the Hotel du Louvre looking out over the scene.