Hôtel du Louvre

The place, briefly

By the late 1890s Camille Pissarro's method was fixed: find a window high enough to see a busy piece of city, take the room, and paint the same view until the light and the weather had been worked through. He did it on the boulevard Montmartre, on the rue de Rivoli, on the quai Voltaire and on the place Dauphine. This hotel is one of the best of those rooms.

He stayed from late 1897 into 1898 and painted the wide junction below — the place du Théâtre-Français in front of the Comédie-Française, the Avenue de l'Opéra running away to the north-west, the rue Saint-Honoré. Around eleven paintings came out of the stay.

The avenue is itself the subject. It had been driven through the old quarter only two decades earlier as part of Haussmann's rebuilding, and Pissarro — a lifelong anarchist who disliked what the rebuilding had done to working Paris — painted its wide, prosperous emptiness with a coolness that is easy to miss under the pretty weather effects.

The hotel still trades, and the room is not simply a plaque: it markets a Pissarro Suite that can be booked. The interiors have been renovated many times over; the height and the view are what remain of his.