To offer you even more information about the museum and Vincent van Gogh, and serve you better, we use cookies. By clicking ‘Accept’, you are giving us permission to use these cookies. Cookies help us to ensure that the website works properly. We also analyse how the website is used, so that we can make any necessary improvements. Advertisements can also be displayed tailored to your interests. And finally, we use cookies to display forms, Google Maps and other embedded content.
Find out more about our cookies.

Discover the Parisian print world

passer-by

The greatest spectacle in fin de siècle Paris was the crowd passing by on the boulevards.

In his famous poem A une passante, the poet Charles Baudelaire described how he suddenly caught sight like ‘a lightning flash’ of that one woman in the crowd ‘by whose glance I was suddenly reborn’.

Artists followed in his footsteps, intensely observing passers-by and incorporating them in their cityscapes.

View this artwork
View this artwork
  • Social Types

    Printmakers like Pierre Bonnard focused primarily on the visual spectacle of the passing crowd.

    They set out to capture the movements of passers-by in shadows and silhouettes.

    Bonnard presented a strolling Parisienne in Woman with Umbrella as a lively and elegant, but sharply delineated expanse of black, and in doing so created an icon of modern urban life.

  • View this artwork
  • Visual Spectacle

    More engaged artists presented the street as a place of encounter for different social types. While the lives of the social classes — and the sexes — generally remained strictly separate, everyone mixed when walking in the street.

    Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen depicted this quite literally in his monumental poster La rue, where the proletarian and the capitalist, the Parisienne and the laundress, mingle on the same street.

  • View this artwork

Further Reading

Charles Baudelaire, A une passante, in Les Fleurs du mal, 1857 and Le Peintre de la vie moderne, 1863

Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities. Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, Berkeley 1998

Ursula Perucchi-Petri, Die Nabis und das moderne Paris. Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton und Toulouse-Lautrec, aus der Sammlung Arthur und Hedy Hahnloser-Bühler und aus Schweizer Museums- und Privatbesitz, Bern 2011

177 prints in 'passer-by'

  • p2552-002S2010
  • p2554-008S2010
  • p2489fS2006
  • p2504S2009
  • p2524S2009
  • p2528S2009
  • p2520S2009
  • p0165V1966
  • p0087V1962
  • p0095V1962
  • p0921S1997
  • p0947S1998
  • p0928S1998
  • p0316V1982
  • p0318V1982
  • p0320V1982
  • p0325M1978
  • p0327M1978
  • p0339V1982
  • p0424V1982
  • p0426V1982
  • p0427V1982
  • p0795V1982
  • p0796V1982
  • p0852S1996
  • p0871S1997
  • p0901N1996
  • p2440V2004
  • p2441V2004
  • p2442V2004
  • p2457V2004
  • p2460V2004
  • p2463V2004
  • p2464V2004
  • p2465V2004
  • p2437iV2004
  • p2359S2003
  • p2360S2003
  • p1784V2000
  • p1975S2001
  • p1988S2002
  • p2090S2002
  • p2091S2002
  • p1632V2000
  • p1674V2000
  • p1692V2000
  • p1694V2000
  • p1695V2000
  • p1696V2000
  • p1495V2000
  • p1489V2000
  • p1483V2000
  • p1492V2000
  • p1766V2000
  • p1767V2000
  • p1157V2000
  • p1164V2000
  • p1165V2000
  • p1166V2000
  • p1167V2000
  • p1168V2000
  • p1170V2000
  • p1172V2000
  • p1173V2000
  • p1174V2000
  • p1176V2000
  • p1177V2000
  • p1178V2000
  • p1179V2000
  • p1194V2000
  • p1195V2000
  • p1201V2000
  • p1205V2000
  • p1207V2000
  • p1208V2000
  • p1232V2000
  • p1235V2000
  • p1236V2000
  • p1267V2000
  • p1270V2000
  • p1271V2000
  • p1278V2000
  • p1282V2000
  • p1398V2000
  • p1410V2000
  • p1414V2000
  • p1419V2000
  • p1526V2000
  • p1527V2000
  • p1532V2000
  • p1546V2000
  • p1547V2000
  • p1548V2000
  • p1549V2000
  • p1171V2000
  • p1108V2000
  • p0996V2000
  • p1003V2000
  • p1004V2000
  • p1025V2000
  • p1055V2000
  • p1056V2000
  • p1059V2000
  • p1062V2000
  • p1063V2000
  • p1075V2000
  • p1089V2000
  • p1096V2000
  • p2532S2010
  • p2535S2010
  • p2548S2010
  • p2553-002S2010
  • p2554-002S2010
  • p2554-003S2010
  • p2560S2011
  • p2569S2011
  • p2574S2011
  • p2575S2011
  • p2577S2011
  • p2597S2011
  • p2593-010S2011
  • p2593-012S2011
  • p2593-015S2011
  • p2593-017S2011
  • p0769-003M1992
  • p0769-010M1992
  • p0769-018M1992
  • p0769-023M1992
  • p2595S2011
  • p2598S2011
  • p2599S2011
  • p1608-003V2000
  • p1608-010V2000
  • p1608-018V2000
  • p1608-023V2000
  • d1065V2004r
  • p2630S2011
  • p2673S2012
  • p2678S2012
  • p2695S2012
  • p2692S2012
  • p1985-003S2002
  • p1985-005S2002
  • p1985-010S2002
  • p1985-014S2002
  • p1985-015S2002
  • p1985-020S2002
  • p1985-022S2002
  • p1985-023S2002
  • p1985-032S2002
  • p2708-003S2013
  • p2708-004S2013
  • p2708-006S2013
  • p2708-007S2013
  • p2708-008S2013
  • p2708-010S2013
  • p2708-011S2013
  • p2723S2013
  • p2725S2013
  • p2763S2015
  • d1195S2015
  • p2765-005S2015
  • p2781S2016
  • p2809S2017
  • p2810S2017
  • p2816S2017
  • p2824S2018
  • p2825S2018
  • p2826S2018
  • p2857S2018
  • p2858S2018
  • p2860S2018
  • p2890S2018
  • p2906S2018
  • p2911S2018
  • p3061S2022

Search the French print collection

Discover more

Continue your journey into the Parisian print world of the fin de siècle. Discover more printmakers, stories and themes. The connections are endless.

Explore