Distinctions in Scale: Camille Pissarro's Place du Théâtre Français Series

Discussions regarding weather conditions, seasons, and time have dominated analysis of seriality in Impressionist painting. Camille Pissarro’s urban views from the 1890s exhibit a different seriality—one focused not just on light and atmosphere in a given location, but also on the experience of urban space as visualized across different scales. Parisian building codes established during Baron Georges Haussmann’s mid nineteenth-century renovation mandated that all edifices be constructed to a certain height and incorporate balconies on upper story windows to achieve uniformity throughout the city, but Pissarro’s works show that despite an attempt at regulating points of view, alterations of scale allowed for myriad experiences of both lived and pictorial space. Through an examination of the Place du Théâtre Français paintings, I argue that manipulation of scale became a means for Pissarro to resist the controlled vistas imposed by modern Paris and challenge the homogeneity of the city by offering multiple visualizations of urban space. Pissarro’s use of canvases with the same dimensions throughout the Place du Théâtre Français series allows for a productive comparison of issues of scale within these paintings, all of which were made from the same balcony. Manipulations in scale demonstrate how Pissarro concentrated on specific aspects of the urban landscape by tinkering with scale to include or eliminate certain monuments within his sightline, most notably Charles Garnier’s Opéra. The range of visual effects in Pissarro’s depiction of the public square at a series of scales equals that of atmospheric conditions typically associated with Impressionist series.