Paris 5th arrondissement, in the morning series — 7 Paintings by Arnaud Quercy

These seven facets of 72 Facets of Paris belong to the morning, between twenty past eight and twenty past ten, when the waltz has long left its prelude behind and the dance gathers pace across the Latin Quarter. Where the city's earliest series held its breath in the dark, the 5th wakes fully into the day: market squares filling, old streets stirring, the great public dome of the hill catching the first full light. Seven measures of three-time, carried up and over the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève as the morning comes into its strength.

Their harmonies are bright and busy, restless rather than grave. Dominant chords drive the movement — F7, A♭7, D7, the sharp-edged E♭7♯11 — while half-diminished sonorities (C−7♭5, A−7♭5) lend a passing tension and the richer Dominus voicings, B♭−9 and D♭maj9, open out into space. Translated through the artist's ideamorphic method, these harmonies turn to a high, mobile palette: ochre and olive, purple and magenta, navy laced with orange flashes, and again and again a clean white square punched into the field — the signature of mid-morning light striking stone.

The circuit climbs and descends the hill. The market on the Place Maubert opens at twenty past eight in purple, olive and ochre, a blue arc and red across the filling stalls; twenty minutes on, the old rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève answers with a purple band over blue and navy, magenta and an orange edge, worn façades climbing. At nine the Panthéon stands monumental — an orange block, magenta and green, a white square against deep shadow, the great public dome full of morning. Then the cobbled top of rue Mouffetard at twenty past nine in black and blue, olive-green and a purple block; its foot at twenty to ten, the food market toward Saint-Médard below the cafés of the Contrescarpe, navy charged with red-orange. At ten the haussmannian blocks of the boulevard Saint-Michel rise in navy and grey, blue and an orange flash; and at twenty past ten the Place de la Sorbonne closes the series with navy and gold, lavender and an ochre disc — chapel, cafés, students and terraces.

Seen together, the seven compose a luminous, agitated field — purples and navies broken everywhere by ochre, orange and those white squares of struck light, the whole climbing and turning with the slope of the hill. It is the Latin Quarter caught mid-stride, neither dawn-still nor noon-bright but fully in motion. Each holds its place in the mosaic (column 4, rows 2 through 8) which, fully assembled, forms an abstract portrait of Paris. Like the full cycle of seventy-two, these seven facets were commissioned together and now belong to a single Paris collection.