have always loved the immense streets of Paris, shimmering in the sun, the crowds of all colours, those beautiful linear and aerial perspectives, those eccentric fashions, etc. But how to do it? To install oneself in the middle of the street is impossible in Paris.

Ludovic Piette, letter to Pissarro 18721

Early in 1897 Pissarro began a series of paintings of the intersection of the boulevards Montmartre, Haussmann and des Italiens with the rues de Richelieu and Drouot. Between 10 February and 17 April he painted fourteen views looking east along the Boulevard Montmartre, and a further two towards the Boulevard des Italiens. From the 1860s Baron Haussmann’s interventions transformed Paris. The narrow, winding streets of the medieval city – easily barricaded in the 1848 revolution – were destroyed. Approximately 150 kilometres of road were constructed, with long avenues, apartments of a standard height, public gardens, the Paris Opéra and other public buildings, new bridges, gas lamps, a new water supply and sewers, reinvented the city.

By the late 1880s Pissarro solved the conundrum suggested by his friend Piette: elevation. From a room in the Hôtel de Russie, on the corner of the Boulevard des Italiens and Rue Drouot, Pissarro looked down onto the new spaces of Paris. Although the artist and subsequent commentators are very particular about the locations of the Boulevard Montmartre series, the city’s topography is not his subject. Rather it is the changing conditions of the streets themselves. Pissaro took several cues from Monet; the high viewpoint and bustling street recall his friend’s painting Boulevard des Capucines 1873.2Both artists show the city’s hustle and bustle – a scatter of people à la japonaise, the melange of dress and hats, pillar boxes and carriage wheels – channelled down the grand boulevard.

Boulevard Montmartre, morning, cloudy weather is an extraordinarily energetic painting. Pissarro’s ink and wash drawing of 1897 shows the basic components of the fourteen canvasses, but in the paintings the vanishing point is higher.3This gives the scene greater vibrancy, and makes us feel as if we are leaning out into the street. The merging of the boulevards in the distance, fringed on either side by footpaths, street-level shops and regulation-height apartments, all serve to emphasise the high perspective. A forest of chimneys is echoed by spindly trees, which line the boulevard. The patchwork of shop windows at right seems to take on elements of the crowds. An ‘imperial coach’, the heads of passengers visible through the open roof, ferries people down the boulevard. The scene is rendered with a palette of great subtlety: greys, browns and whites accented with red and tiny amounts of green. Pissarro’s fixed viewpoint meant that he recorded the ever-shifting configurations of crowds and traffic. At times the differences between the position of people in the street from one Boulevard painting to another is so slight that we could be looking at photographs of the same scene, taken only moments apart.

Lucina Ward

1 In Janine Bailly-Herzberg (ed.), Mon cher Pissarro – Lettres de Ludovic Piette à Camille Pissarro, Paris: Editions du Valhermeil, 1985, p. 73.

2 Monet, either the version in Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, or the painting in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

3 Carriages on the Boulevard Montmartre 1897, private collection; see Karen Levitov and Richard Shiff, Camille Pissarro: impressions of city and country, New York: Jewish Museum, 2007, p. 70.

Turner had never made any drawings [watercolours] like these before, and never made any like them again … He is not showing his hand in these, but his heart.1

An inveterate traveller, Turner visited Switzerland on his first continental tour in 1802, during the short-lived Treaty of Amiens. He was greatly inspired by the sublime qualities of the alpine landscape, although he did not return until 1836. However during his later years he visited continental Europe regularly, travelling through Switzerland annually from 1841 to 1844. The resulting watercolours are acknowledged as some of his most important works; a final flourish in his extraordinary output.

In the late summer of 1841 Turner spent time in Lucerne, exploring its surrounding mountains, valleys and lakes. One of the best-known local features is the Rigi, a mountain comparatively small in height (1798 metres) but with a dominant presence to the east of the town across Lake Lucerne. Unlike the numerous tourists who ascended the Rigi to witness sunset or sunrise from the summit, Turner was captivated by the mountain rather than its view, and was preoccupied with capturing the transitory effects of light and atmospheric conditions in numerous colourful wash sketches.

On his return to London Turner presented his dealer, Thomas Griffith, with a new format for marketing his art, providing him with fifteen small sketches from which his patrons could make selections to be worked up into finished watercolours, together with four such completed ‘specimens’ to demonstrate the result. The four included two contrasting views of the Rigi, one now known as The Blue Rigi,2in which the looming mass is shadowed by the radiant dawn light emanating from behind it, and this work, The Red Rigi, in which the mountain’s heights glow ethereally pink with the last rays of the setting sun. In both, Turner explored the reflections and refractions in the foreground water and the activity on the lake’s surface, probably viewed from his hotel window. The Red Rigi was purchased by his Scottish friend and patron H.A.J. Munro of Novar, who acquired half the resulting ten watercolours, commissioning another dawn view, known as The Dark Rigi.3Turner’s great advocate John Ruskin first saw The Red Rigi displayed at Griffith’s salesroom and recalled ‘such a piece of colour as had never come my way before’: within a few years his father had acquired it from Munro.4In 1851 Ruskin senior wrote to his son in Venice informing him of Turner’s death, saying that The Red Rigi ‘fed and soothed me like a Dead March all this evening …’.5

In 2007 the three finished Rigi watercolours were united for the first time, exhibited at Tate Britain, along with their sample sketches, additional studies and paintings based around Lucerne. Varying noticeably from their original sketches, the watercolours demonstrate the remarkable level of sophistication to which Turner had raised the medium. Skilfully combining stippling, hatching, scratching back to create highlights, washes and gouache, and with incomparable colouristic ability, Turner evokes a luminous grandeur to the Swiss vista that he studied with such contemplation.

Alisa Bunbury

1 John Ruskin in E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (eds), The works of John Ruskin, vol. xiii, London: George Allen, 1904, p. 484.

2 Collection of the Tate Britain.

3 Private collection, United Kingdom.

4 John Ruskin in Ruskin on pictures: volume 1, Turner at the National Gallery and in Mr Ruskin’s collection, E.T. Cook (ed.), London: George Allen, 1902, p. 361.

5 John James Ruskin to John Ruskin, 21 December 1851, quoted in Ian Warrell, Through Switzerland with Turner: Ruskin’s first selection from the Turner Bequest, London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1995, p. 17.