The Boulevard Montmartre at Night

Description

A double row of electric lamps runs straight down the centre of the boulevard, each one smudged into a small blaze of yellow and white where the paint sits thickest on the canvas. Camille Pissarro set this streak of light against rain-wet paving stones, and the reflections break apart into short, broken strokes that never quite settle into a single shape. This Boulevard Montmartre at Night reproduction carries that same built-up glow, the paint laid on thick exactly where the original picture needed it.

About Boulevard Montmartre at Night Reproduction

Pissarro painted this view from a room at the Hotel de Russie in the winter of 1897, looking down on a boulevard he had already painted thirteen times that year in full daylight. This is the only one he set after dark, and the change in hour changes everything about how the street reads. Gas light spills warm and orange from shop fronts and cafe windows along the lower edge of the composition, while the cooler white of the new electric lamps marches away toward a vanishing point lost in haze. Carriages and pedestrians appear only as dark, elongated smudges, caught moving rather than posed, which was the whole point of working in this broken, dashed manner that Pissarro had been developing since the 1880s.

The hand-painted reproduction

The handling of colour does most of the work here. Blue-grey shadow pools under the arcades, gaslight bleeds into amber at the shop windows, and the wet street holds streaks of both at once, laid down wet into wet so the colours mix slightly on the canvas rather than staying separate. It is a demanding passage to reproduce by hand, and our painters work from high-resolution reference images to rebuild those layered dabs of yellow, white, and blue stroke by stroke rather than reducing them to a flat wash. The result is a hand-painted oil painting reproduction built up in the same tactile way as the original, with raised ridges of paint where the lamplight hits hardest and softer, thinner passages in the haze above the rooftops. Each one is a handmade oil painting, not a print under glass, and the artist adjusts pressure and loading of the brush as the image develops so the surface catches real light the way an oil surface should.

• Hand-painted oil on canvas, rebuilt stroke by stroke from the original
• Available in a range of sizes to suit your wall
• Gallery-ready presentation on artist-grade canvas
• Certificate of authenticity included with every order
• Painted to order in 2 to 3 weeks, then delivered in 5 to 7 days