Jean Béraud

Schweitzer Galleries, New York

Patrick Offenstadt, Jean Béraud 1849-1935, The Belle Époque: A Dream of Times Gone By, catalogue raisonné, Cologne, 1999, p. 110, no. 48, illustrated

Oil on stable panel. The work has been recently been cleaned. Under UV: very faint, deliberate spots inpainting fluoresce in the sky.
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While Parisian shops long had the reputation for quality goods, it was only toward the end of the eighteenth century that the boutiques themselves became destinations and their interior décor and shopping experience became as well known as the couture they offered. While his contemporaries, the Impressionists, largely ignored the world of retail (perhaps afraid of the association with commercial advertising and fashion illustration so popular at the time), Jean Béraud embraced the shops of the rue de la Paix, including the famous Maison Doucet and Maison Paquin, as an important part of Parisian life, as seen in the present work (Françoise Tétart-Vittu,”Shops-Versus  Department Stores,” Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity, exh. cat., Musée d’Orsay, Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and The Art Institute of Chicago, 2012-13, p. 210-4).