Jean Béraud

Sale: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 4 February 1952, lot 34

Sale: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 16 June 1972, lot 93

Sale: Sotheby's, London, 5 July 1978, lot 247

Sale: Christie's, London, 29 November 1991, lot 59

Sale: Sotheby's, London, 14 November 2007, lot 336

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Patrick Offenstadt, Jean Béraud. Catalogue raisonné, Cologne, 1999, pp. 90-91, no. 9, illustrated.

Dated between 1885 and 1890, this mise en scène on the streets of Paris epitomizes Jean Béraud's penchant for painting quotidian moments of modern urban life. Here, a dapper young man has given a wrapped bouquet to a delivery man who inspects the intended address written on a small piece of paper. The roofs of post-Hausmann Paris poke out above the trees behind them while an elegantly dressed young woman crosses the boulevard with a little white dog in tow.

Béraud's sophisticated eye was drawn to the characters that populated the bustling streets, cafés and theatres of Paris and his broad affection for all of them granted him notoriety and popularity. Marcel Proust described him as “a charming creature, sought in vain by every social circle” (as quoted in Patrick Offenstadt, Jean Béraud, 1849-1935, The Belle Époque: A Dream of Times Gone By, catalogue raisonné, Cologne, 1999, p. 7) and indeed Béraud was one of the city’s most scrupulous and devoted observers, traversing the city in a mobile studio, intent on capturing the fleeting events and interactions that contributed to la vie moderne.