The Place du Havre, Paris

Omnibuses and carriages stream across the Place du Havre before the Gare Saint-Lazare, pedestrians hurrying through the misty morning air of a working Paris street. Camille Pissarro painted the view in 1893 from his window at the Hôtel Garnier, where he stayed for a few weeks early that year, and the canvas marks his return to the modern city — a subject his Impressionist colleagues had all but abandoned by the 1890s — and to the loose, multidirectional brushwork he had set aside during his experiments with Neo-Impressionism. The building at the left edge is the station itself, its glass roof catching the pale light, and the whole scene is alive with the noise and movement of traffic that the painter loved to transcribe. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago, in the Potter Palmer Collection.