Champs-Elysees with Arc de Triomphe, Paris

Champs-Élysées with Arc de Triomphe, Paris, executed in pastel in 1928, reflects Ury's extended visits to Paris across his career and his persistent interest in the great Haussmann boulevards as optical subjects. Ury had spent formative time in Paris in the 1870s and 1880s, where he encountered French Impressionist painting firsthand, and he returned to the French capital repeatedly. By 1928 — the year he completed a series of Paris pastels — he was seventy years old and had been producing urban nocturnes for over four decades, yet the works retain their freshness and optical intensity. The Champs-Élysées offered a subject comparable to his Berlin Unter den Linden compositions: a great tree-lined avenue, illuminated at night, with the Arc de Triomphe as focal architectural terminus. Pastel was a medium Ury used throughout his career alongside oil, and his pastel technique was highly regarded — the medium's inherent luminosity and the chalky texture it produces suit the soft diffusion of nocturnal light particularly well. The 1928 Paris series shows an artist in old age still engaged with the core problems of his career.

Pastel allows Ury to blend and layer colour with a directness and softness unavailable in oil, and his handling exploits the medium's chalky luminosity for atmospheric night effects. The Arc de Triomphe at the avenue's end is indicated with sufficient precision to identify but not so described as to become hard architectural drawing — it floats in the luminous atmospheric haze. Warm streetlight tones are blended into the cool blue-grey of the night sky without a sharp transition.