“Paris sous la neige”

A grand Parisian boulevard under snow — horse-drawn omnibuses moving through the white, fashionably dressed figures picking their way along the pavement, shop fronts glowing warmly in the cold air, the Haussmann buildings stretching away into a grey and luminous sky. Antoine Blanchard (1910–1988) painted this canvas in 1970, but the Paris he is showing us belongs to another era entirely — the Belle Époque of the 1890s and early 1900s, before the motor car changed the city for ever. The palette is Blanchard at his most accomplished: the subtle range of greys and whites that describe the snow, the warm amber and gold of the shop lights that give the scene its life, the careful placing of colour accents — a brown coat here, the yellow of the omnibus there — that prevent the whole from sinking into monotone. The brushwork is his characteristic small, feathery stroke applied with delicacy and precision, building the surface gradually from hundreds of individual marks that at a viewing distance coalesce into a complete and convincing impression of a winter afternoon in the city. The sky, the snow and the buildings are handled with equal care but different emphases — the sky in broad confident sweeps, the snow in textured broken strokes, the buildings in tighter, more deliberate marks that give the architecture its solidity. The Paris that Blanchard painted never actually existed — not quite. Born Marcel Masson in the Loire Valley in 1910, he arrived in Paris too late for the Belle Époque and experienced the city's pre-war charm only through the sepia postcards and faded photographs he collected obsessively. What he painted was Paris as it lived in the collective imagination — elegant, horse-drawn, gas-lit, unhurried — and he did so with such conviction and technical skill that generations of collectors on both sides of the Atlantic came to love it as though they remembered it themselves. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Rennes and then in Paris, where he won the Prix de Rome, and is considered the last painter of the École de Paris tradition. He died in 1988 having devoted forty years to a city that existed, in his version of it, only on canvas.