Camille Pissarro was one of the pioneering Impressionist painters. He wasn’t only concerned with the emergence of this new style of painting, and he saw Impressionism as the expression of his anarchic social convictions. Impressionistic painting constituted the grapple with contemporary life. For many years, Pissarro had been the painter of French landscapes. Only when he was older did he adopt Parisian street-life as a motif. His dealer, Durand-Ruel, had encouraged him to do this in the hope of a good turnover for such paintings.

In February 1897 Pissarro rented a hotel room with a bird’s eye view of the Boulevard Montmartre. His son wrote that he spent the whole day at this observation point, and eagerly awaited the procession of the Mardi gras, the highlight of the carnival. He had prepared himself to paint the festivities. The time available to do this was very short, which is why the picture is painted in a spontaneous and sketch like manner, with the white canvas often showing through. We can see the mass of people in the Boulevard, between an advertising column and a kiosk. Colourful strips of paper are falling from the houses into the scene and they mix with the leafless trees along the avenue. The dark dots and the colourful strips convey the impression of the whirl and frenzy of the festival. The moving mass in the city was a new theme in painting, and it was with this that Pissarro led Impressionism into the 20th century.