Boulevard, from Some Aspects of Paris Life

In this print, Pierre Bonnard incorporated the horizontal format, vertically divided pictorial space, and raised picture plane that are commonly found in prints by Japanese artists such as Katsushika Hokusai. In an 1882 essay published in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, French critic Théodore Duret wrote that Japanese landscape style was "seen from high above, with a perspective which lifts distant planes up to the top of the picture and makes peo­ple and objects stand out not against the background of sky, but against the background of land­scape itself."