About this work
is an 1878 oil on canvas in which Manet captured the eponymous Parisian street dressed in French tricolour flags for the *Fête de la Paix* — the first French national holiday, held on 30 June 1878.
Painted from his second-floor studio window, the scene pulses with Manet's most precise, staccato brushwork, the reds, whites, and blues of the flags creating a patriotic harmony across the facades of the new Haussmann-era buildings.
Tricolour flags hang from buildings above passing pedestrians and carriages, while in the foreground a man shoulders a ladder beside a one-legged figure on crutches — possibly a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War.
Behind a fence to the left, rubble from the construction works extending the Gare Saint-Lazare breaks the festive mood. The composition has the casual, cropped quality of a stolen glance out a window — alive, unposed, and shot through with quiet tension.
The painting was made to commemorate the 1878 Exposition Universelle — itself a celebration of luxury and prosperity — on a national holiday that also marked France's recovery from the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and the bloody Paris Commune that followed.
Manet's sensitivity to the associated costs and sacrifices tempered his optimistic view of national pride and newfound prosperity. That undercurrent is what separates this canvas from a simple celebration: the amputee and the rubble sit inside a picture full of flags, and Manet refuses to resolve the contradiction. Claude Monet painted similar flag-draped street scenes of the Rue Montorgueil and Rue Saint-Denis that same year , but where Monet dissolved his figures into colour and movement, Manet's street-level figures remain stubbornly legible — witnesses, not ornaments.
This is a painting that rewards a living room or study where natural light can shift across it through the day — morning sun will pull the blues forward; late afternoon will warm the cream-coloured facades into gold. It suits a viewer drawn to history that hasn't been tidied up: someone who notices the crutches before the flags. The horizontal format and open sky give it an airy presence without demanding a large wall, and the bold tricolour palette holds its own against rich, dark interiors as easily as bright contemporary ones. There is celebration here, but also weight — which makes it far more interesting to live with than straightforward pageantry.
