Alive
Painted in 1897. Pissarro took a room at the Grand Hôtel de Russie and painted the boulevard from the window. The trees along both pavements have just come into leaf. Horse cabs run down the middle of the road and the crowd keeps to the pavement. He painted this same view 14 times that year, at different hours and in different weather. By 1923 the canvas belonged to Max Silberberg, an industrialist in Breslau. On 23 March 1935 the Nazi regime forced him to sell his collection at auction in Berlin. In 2000 the painting was returned to his family. His daughter-in-law Gerta Silberberg left it on loan to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, with a plaque telling what had happened to it, until 2013. In February 2014 Sotheby’s in London sold it for £19.7 million, double the estimate. The canvas is 65 cm by 81.
look closer
A gas lamp on an iron post stands in the middle of the road, and the cabs go round it on both sides. Pissarro painted all of this looking down from a hotel window.