Jean Béraud

Paul Wallraf, London
Jane Abdy, London
Private collection
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, 24 April, 2002, lot 95
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

Patrick Offenstadt, Jean Beraud 1849-1935, The Belle Époque: A Dream of Times Gone By, Catalogue Raisonné, Cologne, 1999, pp. 128-129, no. 91, illustrated

London, M. Newman Gallery, 1963, no. 2

Intrigued by all aspects of la vie parisienne, Béraud became its scrupulous and devoted observer. He was the quintessential chronicler of Belle Époque Paris. He was acclaimed by his Salon habitués for his charm and wit, and by an admiring public. The present work is typical of his paintings of fashionable Parisian boulevards, which include various members of society, including here a mendicant at right. 

Béraud travelled the boulevards of Paris in a mobile studio, a converted carriage designed specifically so that he might observe the often unnoticed, fleeting incidents of city life first hand, much in the way that Charles-François Daubigny and later Claude Monet would paint from boats outfitted as floating studios. The inspiration for Fiacre, Place de la Concorde may well have come as Béraud toured the city in this way.

Béraud's figures possess individual expressions but remain psychologically ambiguous, inviting the viewer to speculate how the protagonists relate, and whether the fiacre, the small four-wheeled carriage, is arriving at or leaving the scene.