In February, I traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of art, where I was able to see Camille Pissarro’s painting The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning, which depicts the busy streets of Paris and its new consumer culture. The boulevard was a product of Haussmannization, the revolutionary modernization project of Paris that helped make it one of the greatest tourist attractions in the world. During this transformation, wide boulevards were created, filled with restaurants and shops. The painting included many omnibuses, one of the main forms of travel to and from boulevards, which represents how great of an attraction the boulevards were. The boulevard also included tall buildings, stores and sidewalks.

It’s hard not to see the connection Pissarro’s captivating painting has with the busy streets of Manhattan. The photograph makes clear the influence of Parisian culture on our world. The most obvious resemblance to the Parisian boulevard are the tall buildings and the wide boulevards. The busy streets are a result of the many shopping centers and the room to spend time on the sidewalks. We have yellow cabs transporting us to and from Manhattan, instead of Parisian omnibuses. New Yorkers can be seen enjoying everything Times Square has to offer, just as the Parisians did at the boulevards.

One of the goals of this class was to learn about our surroundings in New York by taking what we learned in class and applying it to what we see outside. Pissarro’s painting, paired with the photograph beautifully illustrates how we can see our surroundings through the lens of nineteenth-century Paris.