Twelve paintings made between 1786 and 1897 show Paris torn down and rebuilt, from Hubert Robert's demolition on the Pont Notre-Dame to Monet's Gare Saint-Lazare, Seurat's Eiffel Tower and a rainy street corner by Gustave Caillebotte.
The demolition started under a king. In 1786, decades before Baron Haussmann remade the capital for Napoleon III, workmen were stripping the houses off a bridge over the Seine.
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How These Were Chosen
Haussmann was prefect of the Seine, the official who governed the capital. Between 1853 and 1870, he had much of Paris torn down and rebuilt, and medieval lanes gave way to wide boulevards lined with apartment buildings.
Painters followed the work. The new city gave them long straight streets, stations of iron and glass, world's fairs, crowds on the sidewalks and dance halls on the hill at the edge of town. Many climbed high to paint it, to a window or a hilltop where a whole street and its crowd fit into one view.
The paintings here come out of that change. Each shows old Paris coming down, the city built in its place, or the spots where that new city went to enjoy itself, between the late 1700s and the end of the 1800s. They are numbered as a countdown, so the dates jump back and forth.
12. Hubert Robert, Demolition of the Houses on the Pont Notre-Dame in 1786
In old Paris, houses stood on the bridges themselves, in rows along both sides of the roadway. On the Pont Notre-Dame, which links the Île de la Cité to the Right Bank, small figures are pulling down the last of them. Hubert Robert painted the scene in 1786, the year they came down.
Those houses had lined the bridge for centuries, until a royal edict of 1786 ordered them demolished, along with those on the other bridges of Paris, for two reasons: public health and the embellishment of the capital.
Between two clusters still standing, the roadway now lies open to the sky. Daylight falls on paving the houses had long kept in shade, and boats wait on the river below.
Robert had made his name painting the ruins of antiquity, and he treated this bridge the same way, except that these ruins were being made in front of him. The clearing of old Paris had begun more than sixty years before Haussmann.
At a Glance
Artist: Hubert Robert (1733 to 1808)
Painted: 1786
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 73 × 140 cm (29 × 55 in)
Where to see it: Musée du Louvre, Paris
11. Édouard Manet, View of the Universal Exhibition of 1867
Small groups of Parisians stand on a grassy hill in the foreground and look down at a temporary city of pavilions spread out below them. Édouard Manet set this view of the Universal Exhibition of 1867 on a wide canvas and never finished it.
He painted the fair from the outside, and not only because of the hill. Its art exhibition had left him out.