Painted in 1975, “Vue de la vie dans les jardins le long du Boulevard à Cannes” A View of the Gardens along the Boulevard in Cannes shows Pissarro as a painter of the modern age. The bustle of the street is perfectly conveyed in this scene of cosmopolitan life. The promanad is crowded with people; some are walking, whereas others are gathered in what appears to be conversation. The center of the foreground shows a family with two small girls admiring the gardens of this famous part of the walk in Cannes. Pissarro has only painted a few views of this famed walkway one of the others having been sold at Christie's New York in 1992.
In looking at “Vue de la vie dans les jardins le long du Boulevard à Cannes” ‘A View of the Gardens along the Boulevard in Cannes”, one can well see why many feel that Claude became finally what he had been only intermittently: a landscape painter of towns.
As he progressed in his career, Pissarro has paid more and more attention to the cityscape, increasingly focussing on modernity and modern living as a theme. Paris at the turn of the century provided plenty of material for his canvases and plenty of food for thought. Even now, as a relatively old man, he has been seen to enjoy aspects of the quiet country life, and able also to capture the elegance of the city in his oils and pastels. Paris along with the villages dotting the Mediterranean coast of France has long had an extra pull for the artist because of their beauty, sweeping boulevards and well-planned cityscapes providing a wealth of compositionally attractive views.
Like his father before him Claude more than many Impressionists focussed on the theme of the cityscape while maintaining his unique ability to also capture images of change in nature. Pissarro retained a fascination for rural themes, but increasingly has turned towards the city as his theme, possibly another reflection of his political tendencies. For the countryside, in the age of modern life has become decreasingly relevance to the lives of many people. Urbanisation has meant that more and more people are living city life, and it may have been this trend that in part contributed to Pissarro deciding to paint pictures such as “Vue de la vie dans les jardins le long du Boulevard à Cannes” A View of the Gardens along the Boulevard in Cannes but portrayed in the idealistic style of the late 19th Century.
At the same time, one wonders whether perhaps the movements of the people were not to Pissarro as the wind rustling the leaves was to other Impressionists. In his Paris pictures, it is in the sky, the leaves on the occasional tree, and also in the clothing on display that the season is judged. The people themselves give a sense of a captured moment and of passing time, a factor that is increased by the contrast between their scale and the monumentality and sense of weight of the city itself.
The contrast in scale is also underlined by the bird-like vantage-point from which Pissarro has chosen to render this scene. He appears to be sitting in a treetop perched high above street level, as he was in many of his cityscapes over the years. This adds both a dynamism and a sense of scale, of the movements of the people below. The viewer is not an a captive embedded within the crowd, but instead is given a chance to appreciate the mood of the world as it is written on the face of the French seaside village.
It is a tribute to the inspiration that the view shown provided life and was an example of the energies of the artist, already seventy years old by the time “Vue de la vie dans les jardins le long du Boulevard à Cannes” A View of the Gardens along the Boulevard in Cannes was painted.
'His methods seem unwavering always starting a painting by searching for a harmony between the sky on one hand, and earth and water on the other. Only after this has been established does he seem to bring in details.
In this context, it appears that the people are themselves components, a factor that is emphasised by the near distant and raised viewpoint from which they are seen. Indeed, in many ways the sun flecked sky and gardens are a subject of far more import, rendered with far more subtlety, than anything on surrounding the humanity.
It is a tribute both to the cosmopolitan appearance of the scene and to its quality that it was formerly in the collection of a German industrialist.
