A master of landscape painting, Camille Pissarro health forced him to limit his time painting outside near the end of his life, and Boulevard Montmartre, Morning, Cloudy Weather is one such example.
Wanting to focus more on city painting, the artist took a room in a hotel in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris, where, over the course of two months in 1797, he painted fourteen canvases of the view from his window.
Throughout his career, Camille Pissarro was primarily interested in the effects of light and weather on his subjects, rather than capturing any anatomical features or other details of the subjects themselves. To this end, during this period he worked on multiple paintings at once, changing canvases as the light changed over the course of the day.
This version of Camille Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre, morning, cloudy weather can be found in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, where it was the gallery’s first Impressionist painting purchased for the collection.