Paris Street Scene

Fernand Lungren’s watercolor painting Paris Street Scene is a casual impression of a rainy day in the French metropolis. A cluster of black umbrellas in the foreground partially blocks the view south across the Pont des Arts, a footbridge spanning the Seine River, which winds through the heart of Paris. At the bridge’s far end looms the imposing cupola-topped building of the Institut de France, a French learned society, reduced almost to silhouette in the haze of the rain-saturated atmosphere. The numerous figures that approach and cross the bridge, all huddled under umbrellas, are rendered darkly monochromatic in a subdued, gloomy light that is just strong enough to reflect off the wet surfaces of cobblestone street and bridge walkway. Touches of opaque white gouache on the bridge suggest wraiths of mist rising from the waters below.

Lungren painted this scene during two years he spent in Paris between 1882 and 1884. He studied briefly at the Académie Julian, a popular academic training-ground among the many American aspiring artists in what was then the capital of the Western art world. Dissatisfied with the school’s instruction, however, Lungren spent much of his time wandering the streets of the city, an observer and recorder trained by his prior experience as an illustrator. The Seine’s embankments, with their stalls housing book and print vendors and their shifting scene of people leisurely strolling, became his favorite haunt and a source of artistic subjects.

Just before he arrived in Paris, Lungren had portrayed New York’s crowded, rain-slick streets for magazine illustrations, anticipating in this relatively humble medium the arrival of such modern subjects in the more formal medium of easel painting. In Paris, he may have been aware of the currency of urban scenes in the works of the avant-garde artists known as the impressionists, who sought to capture the experience of modern everyday life in compositions inspired by the accidental juxtaposition of forms in the ceaseless movement of the urban setting. Indeed, with its black umbrellas crowded near the picture plane, shiny wet surfaces underfoot, and plunging perspective, Paris Street Scene anticipates American artist Childe Hassam’s treatment of the rainy urban streetscape in his Une Averse—rue Bonaparte (TF 1993.20) and Horse Drawn Cabs at Evening, New York, (TF 1999.66) both in the Terra Foundation collection. The asymmetry, monochromaticism, and contrasts of delicate detail and bold massing of Lungren’s watercolor also reflect his encounter with the aesthetics of Japanese woodblock prints, which he occasionally purchased from vendors along the Seine embankment. Such influences conditioned the eye of this artistic tourist, who accordingly portrayed not the Paris anticipated by the typical overseas visitor but an impression derived from direct, personal experience.

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