La Rue belongs to the last significant series of Léger’s career. La Ville (‘The City’) was a series of twenty-nine gouache and watercolour works which celebrated Paris. It was posthumously produced as a set of lithographs by the Paris publisher Tériade in 1959. The life of the city was a topic of lingering concern to French modernists from at least the time of Baudelaire, and one of Léger’s important paintings from earlier in his career treated the title subject of La Ville in a style of mechanistic abstraction (1919, Museum of Modern Art, New York). By contrast, Léger’s later work increasingly emphasised the relationship between the city and its human occupants, as in this work. The spatial treatment of the apartment blocks is characteristically inventive, a continuous plane which knits together different perspectives. This is combined with the prosaic life of Parisians: laundry is drying on washing lines strung up between apartments and a man pushes a cart along the road. In La Rue, Léger is not regarding the glamorous inner city, but rather the outer rim inhabited by common people. The figures in this work are distinctive to Léger, much as Picasso’s large-limbed figures of the 1920s are inimitably his own. An inscription on the reverse – ‘coll. H.X.’ – shows that it was in the collection of Léger’s widow, Nadia Khodasevich. (Her initials are signed in Cyrillic script.) She was instrumental in working after her husband’s death to publish La Ville with Tériade, and this autograph work was returned to the artist’s estate after the lithographs had been printed.