From the early 1890s, eye problems increasingly limited how Pissarro could work. He underwent minor surgery on one eye, writing to his son Georges about sessions to clean the bone at the corner and base of the eye, an unpleasant, repeated procedure that left the eye bandaged and Pissarro unable to work for days at a stretch^[1]. He was permitted outdoors only in the best weather and had to avoid wind entirely, which meant that painting indoors at a window became the practical solution, since he was not a portrait painter and his buyers had little interest in interior scenes^[1]. What began as a medical constraint turned into one of the defining projects of his final decade: elevated cityscapes viewed from hotel and apartment windows gave him a new and varied subject just when his options for working outdoors were narrowing.

Pissarro worked through Paris systematically, moving between hotels and apartments while keeping the same basic method: settle into a room with a striking view, then paint the same scene repeatedly under changing light and weather. He had painted isolated Paris street scenes before, including Boulevard Rochechouart in 1878, but it was his stay at the Hotel Garnier on Rue Saint-Lazare in 1893, painting four views of the street from his window, that began the sustained urban series which occupied him until his death in 1903^[3]. He began and completed each canvas of a session in a single sitting, working close to the glass in the same manner he had used painting outdoors in Rouen or the countryside, so that the finished paintings kept the spontaneity of plein-air work despite being made from behind a window^[3]. Over his last decade this method produced more than three hundred city views in total, an output focused as much on the movement of crowds and traffic as on the buildings around them^[2].

Looking down on a boulevard from a hotel window gave Pissarro compositional options a ground-level view could not. Where a street receding into the distance kept a classical, linear perspective, a square or boulevard seen from directly above could spread flat across the canvas in a single plane, right to the upper edge, leaving little or no room for sky, a device Pissarro and other Impressionists had absorbed from Japanese prints^[2]. Into that flattened space he scattered figures rendered in only two or three touches of paint each, seemingly careless marks that nonetheless captured the specific gait or gesture of a pedestrian crossing the street or boarding a passing omnibus^[2]. That combination, a flattened bird's-eye plan populated with quick, precise human incident, gave Pissarro's boulevard views their sense of a whole city caught in continuous motion rather than a single frozen moment.