By the time Pissarro painted Avenue de l'Opera: Morning, Sunshine (1898), he had begun to cast off some of his inhibitions through the increased motion. Besides an angle shift to the right, the painting has more movement with an increased number of people traveling on the road. As such, Avenue de l’Opera: Morning Sunshine exhibits more of Pissarro’s beliefs of the French people as autonomous players in the Dreyfus Affair compared to Rue Saint-Honore Afternoon Rain Effect. The colorful awnings lined on the sidewalks show the increased foot traffic of shoppers, while horse-drawn carriages travel in different directions. Pissarro’s urban landscape celebrates the bustling nature of cities with large numbers of people traveling about, in motion. His detailed figures are not static; instead, he portrays both the working class and the upper-class buying, selling, walking, and riding in everyday scenes (Brettell xxi, xxvi). The varied types of people moving on Paris’s streets show Pissarro’s concern that the impact of the Dreyfus Affair reached across all segments of society, not just the elite institutions of the Army and Church. The movement Pissarro prominently displays caused one critic, Henri Gergson to term Pissarro’s boulevards and avenues as “living, moving, growing – a ceaseless flux” (qtd. Adler 104). Each person moves independently through the painting, making decisions about the ongoing Dreyfus Affair.
Pissarro develops this idea about decision-making on the streets of France further through the interaction of people and architecture to show the heightened controversy. To the right of the Avenue de l’Opera sits the Place du Theatre Francais, which provides an interesting juxtaposition of angular and circular shapes to sift movement in Pissarro’s work. In both Avenue de l'Opera: Morning, Sunshine and Avenue de l’Opera, Place du Theatre Francais: Misty Weather (1898), the straight lines of the Avenue stand in contrast with the curved structures of the fountain and the roundabouts. “The traffic itself no longer follows the orthogonal, orderly pattern as seen in the Boulevard Montmartre series,” Brettell states. “Here it moves around sets of roundabouts. Yet there is something organic in the way the individual components (pedestrians, carriages, omnibuses, wheelbarrows) form a set of patterns all of their own, free, yet organized, autonomous, yet limited” (Brettell 82). While his analysis and close-read of the painting is correct, Brettell fails to make the connection between these conflicting shapes and the conflicting forces of French society in the late 1890s. The populace traverses through the straight and curved boundaries, possibly a pictorial representation of the French people choosing sides during the Dreyfus Affair. These impediments to traffic balance the paintings, with a line of symmetry dividing the Avenue de l'Opera: Morning, Sunshine almost down the middle. The two sides of the painting and the two curvilinear shapes split the traveling populace, much like the Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s.
Pictured:
Camille Pissarro, Avenue de l'Opera: Morning, Sunshine (1898)
Camille Pissarro, Avenue de l’Opera, Place du Theatre Francais: Misty Weather (1898)