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Paris sketches (daily life)

It’s on a balcony of an apartment located on 198 rue de Rivoli that MONET painted his “Vue des Tuileries” at the same time that RENOIR immortalized, without knowing it, the “Moulin de la Galette”.
Every article of this series is an invitation for a journey out of this time, the opportunity to discover, by confronting the paintings and the descriptions of different locations, the reality of past times.
Bistros are still plenty in tie rue de l’Isly in the 8th arr, where MONET had an atelier at no.8 after the French-Prussian war of 1870. “Just next to the gare Saint-Lazare” he wrote to his friend CAMILLE PISSARO in 1871 after their return from London where they had fled.
A few houses further in the same street, the always-drudging Camille PISSARRO rented in 1893 room 404 in hotel Garnier, with a view on the place du Havre at the beginning of the rue d’Amsterdam. He painted the busy crossroad during rain and obtained “Effets de pluie” you can see at the Chicago Art Institute now. Five years later he painted the double deck buses tracked by horses on the place du Theatre Francais from the window of the Grand Hotel du Louvre, right across the Comedie Francaise. The bus stop is still there and in the hall there is still a reproduction of the famous canvas that moved to Los Angeles. Kirk Douglas stood, in honour of the LA Olympics in 1984 in the same window to tell the story of the poor Camille Pissarro, because the exhibition “L’impressionisme et le paysage Francais” was shown there for the first time.
Camille PISSARRO didn’t sell much, even very little, during his lifetime. He was so poor tat he even hadn’t money for the horse tram. He walked with his paintings under his arm and looked all around town to find some work.
The gare Saint-Lazare was newly built and became the centre of the offices and department stores in Paris. For painters the gare Saint-Lazare was the escape point for outside town, a new portal of the city, representing at the same time “a cathedral of the new humanity” like Theophile Gauthier formulated it.
It’s from this station that trains went to Saint-Germaine-en-Laye, Argenteuil, Chatou or Bougival where the painters could still find unspoiled nature and put them in their own impressions on canvas. The trains still run today, but only for the daily workers and employees living out of town.
CLAUDE MONET painted in 1877 a series of 7 paintings in the gare Saint-Lazare, after having official permission to put his easel on a platform. A few of them are exposed in the Musee d’Orsay or in the musee Marmottan. In fact, compared to today, it didn’t change much. The largest Paris suburb station is a station as it should be. With a gigantic “salle des pas perdus” where millions of lost footsteps still sound hollow in the quiet hours. A glass roof in a metallic structure from Gustave Eiffel, gives the light.

Bibliography

The crisis of Impressionism 1878-1882, by Ann Harbor (university of Michigan)--Visions of City and Country: prints and photographs of 19th century France (Worcester Art museum and New-york, American federation of Arts), Camille Pissarro in Paris: a study of his development by R.Coe (Gazette des Beaux-Arts 1954)