Pissarro's path to painting Parisian squares began far from Paris. He was born in 1830 on the island of Saint Thomas in the Caribbean, the son of a hardware store owner who sent him to school in Passy, France, where a sympathetic headmaster first encouraged his drawing^[4]. Sent back to the family business for several years, Pissarro kept sketching, and a chance encounter with a travelling painter at the island's port persuaded him he could make art his profession. His father eventually sent him to study in Paris, where the 1855 Universal Exhibition exposed him to Delacroix, Courbet, Daubigny and, above all, Corot, whose landscapes drew him in so strongly that Pissarro asked to become his student. Corot did not formally take students but agreed to offer Pissarro guidance, advice that shaped the empirical, spontaneous approach to landscape Pissarro carried for the rest of his career^[4].

A decade older than Monet, Degas and Renoir, Pissarro was the only Impressionist to exhibit in all eight of the group's independent shows between 1874 and 1886, and served within the circle less as a rival than as a mentor and arbitrator between its younger, often quarrelling members^[2]. Unlike his Parisian colleagues, he never considered himself a city dweller, living instead in the surrounding countryside and preferring peasants and farms as subjects for most of his career; a committed social anarchist, his sympathies lay more with rural working people than with the boulevard crowds he painted in this late series^[2]. That the city views of the 1890s came so late in his life, and largely as a response to failing eyesight rather than a shift in subject he had long wanted to make, marks them as something of a departure from the rural landscapes that had occupied him for the previous three decades.

Between 1886 and 1888, Pissarro adopted the pointillist technique associated with Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, applying paint in small, separate touches of colour according to their more systematic, near-scientific method, and for a time he shared the Neo-Impressionist group's anarchist sympathies as well as its technique^[3]. His commitment did not last. By 1888 he was writing to Signac with open doubt, warning that the approach was dangerous and risked abandoning the broader tradition of Impressionist practice he felt needed protecting^[1]. He broke from the method soon after, describing the effect it produced as a sensation of lifeless monotony, a judgement that returned him to the freer, more variable brushwork visible in the later Paris series, including this view of the Place du Théâtre Français, painted a full decade after his brief pointillist detour^[1].