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Overview
Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) was a pivotal French Impressionist artist. Learning much from the older masters Corot and Courbet, with the advent of Impressionism he was mentor to Cézanne and to some extent Renoir - and later Gauguin - and the close artistic companion of Degas. In the 1880s he would be equally influential on the rising stars, Neo-Impressionists Seurat and Signac, himself working convincingly in their Divisionist style. This is an impressive list of names and is testament to an impressive artist and personality.
Although primarily known as a painter, Pissarro was also a relatively prolific printmaker, sometimes working closely with a fellow painter-printmaker in Degas. Probably the greatest Impressionist printmaker other than Degas, the Impressionist style translates convincingly in Pissarro's works - and the same cannot frankly be said for Manet, Renoir and Cézanne, whose prints are essentially valued as inferior, affordable proxies for their paintings.
This lithograph is a close corollary of Pissarro's justly famous paintings of similar scenes of the Paris cityscape taken from a high elevation, often the same street. They represent something of a return to the Impressionism of the 1870s after his Divisionist experimentation of later years. They celebrate the hustle and bustle of the brilliant and still new Paris of Haussmann's boulevards and their remarkably consistent, handsome and elegant architecture. Of Pissarro's far-left anarchist socialist politics, the subject of much academic speculation, there is barely a trace. However, if you are reminded of fellow Impressionist painter Claude Monet's Le Boulevard des Capucines (1873), you are spot on!
See:
The Art Story, 'Camille Pissarro', https://www.theartstory.org/artist-pissarro-camille.htm
Mary Tompkins Lewis, Critical Readings in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: An Anthology (Oakland, 2007)
Wikipedia, 'Camille Pissarro', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Pissarro
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art May 2018