Imagine that you and I are walking along Baron Haussmann’s bustling boulevards in the dramatically modernized urban metropolis of Paris during the late 1800s. What are the signs of the times that we see around us?

Pasted on a nearby wall is a colorful Toulouse-Lautrec poster of a high-kicking can-can dancer, inviting us to the Moulin Rouge. Further down, I see another clever Toulouse-Lautrec poster, this one depicting an elegantly costumed woman in promoting the literary magazine “La Revue Blanche.” And there’s a Vuillard poster advertising a tonic called Becane, which, we see, gives bicyclists a restorative burst of energy. I hope we can find a bottle of Becane in a nearby shop, as our stimulating surroundings are inspiring us to walk further than we’d intended. It seems all of Paris is out today, dressed to the nines, strolling along the broadened boulevards and through the many accessible parks.

Actually, we’re not in Paris, but in the Beck Building of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, roaming with other sightseers around the gallery housing the charming exhibition, “Intimate Settings and Public Spaces: Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Drawings and Prints." Over the weekend its imaginative curator, Dena Woodall, presented a lecture that provided the illuminating back story of this exhibition, which runs through Jan. 17.

Woodall described the exhibition of about 60 works on paper by Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists who painted what they saw around them in Paris during a new age of urban culture marked by social change, industrial expansion, new prosperity, and increased leisure time.

She recounted how the city of Paris began to radically change in the second half of the 1800s, after Napoleon III commissioned an urban renovation program headed by Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann. Haussmann turned a medieval village with narrow streets, overpopulated old buildings, and unhealthy living conditions into a wide-open metropolis with broad walking streets, a network of longer roads facilitating transportation, more soundly built structures, plentiful parks, and much-improved water circulation and sewage systems.

The order imposed on the old city made Paris safer and healthier, and had a positive, productive influence on its people, said Woodall. Thousands of street lamps lit up the night, and people went out to enjoy the new hub of urban life: the cafes. There was great social change, including the rise of the working class, a new prosperity spawned by all the modernization, and a new sense of well-being.

Breaking from academic tradition and its focus on grand themes of history and religion, the new-style Parisian artists depicted intimate domestic scenes populated by family and friends, as well as the convivial social activities they observed in public spaces like the cafes, concert halls and theaters that the city dwellers began to patronize, said Woodall. Many new artists, like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, learned lithography, and took advantage of new paper-making machines and advances in print technology.

Thanks to innovations in color lithography, artists could create eye-catching images that reached a far greater audience than ever before in the form of advertisements, posters, journals, books and book covers, and newspapers.
While these days, we often think of paintings when we consider the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, Woodall cited the wealth of works on paper — like the beautiful posters, pastels, watercolors, lithographs and etchings that make up this exhibition — which “played a critical role in their work.”

Take a walk through Woodall’s recreation of the Paris of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, and you’ll revel in beautiful pictures on paper, reflecting that unique place and time, by artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, and Maurice Denis. While most likely, not everything these artists saw around them in Paris was beautiful, you can see for yourself how these artists took a fresh perspective in showing the most attractive side of city life in Paris at that time.

In so doing, they did something quite admirable — something for which Parisians are uniquely renowned today. They showed the world the art, and the far-reaching, beneficial impact, of a beautiful presentation.