- 35
Jean Béraud
Description
- Jean Béraud
- La Conversation
- signed Jean Béraud (lower right)
- oil on canvas
- 22 by 15 1/2 in.
- 55.9 by 39.3 cm
Provenance
Literature
Condition
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."
Catalogue Note
Abandoning his previous ambitions to become a lawyer, Jean Béraud joined Parisian artistic circles and studied portraiture with Léon Bonnat, a leading artist of the Third Republic. Many of Béraud's well-known contemporaries also passed through Bonnat's studio, including Gustave Caillebotte, Alfred Roll and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. While Béraud initially emulated his master's choice of subject and painted portraits of women and children as well as genre scenes, he was quickly drawn to representing modern urban life and developed his own inimitable style.
The opulent spectacle of the newly created public spaces of Paris became Béraud's choice subjects, including the city’s interior spaces of Paris, such as cafés, ballrooms (see lot 46), theaters (see lot 47), casinos and, rarely, private apartments. Like many of his Impressionist contemporaries, Béraud was interested in the increasingly blurred boundaries of public and private in the city and the balcony had become emblematic of this shift. A ubiquitous architectural feature of the apartments in Haussmann’s Paris, the balcony was an extension of the home as well as a connection to the street, and was thus an indeterminate, simultaneously private and public space (David Van Zanten, “Looking Through, Across and Up, The architectural aesthetics of the Paris Street,” Impressionism, Fashion, Modernity, exh. cat., The Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum, New York, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 2012, p. 154-8). This ambiguous space became a potent device for artists to explore, a most notable example being Édouard Manet’s Le Balcon (1868-9, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) in which he depicts the artist Berthe Morisot and violinist Fanny Claus looking out from a balcony; while Morisot wears relaxed dress with pagoda sleeves suggesting an intimate gathering, Fanny Claus, with her gloves and parasol, is dressed to be out walking. Similarly, Gustave Caillebotte’s Interior, also called Interior, Woman at a Window (1880, Private Collection, fig. 1) depicts a woman dressed for a promenade and turned away from the viewer, looking through the closed door of her balcony towards the shop names and advertisements of the street. In La Conversation, with the balcony doors flung open, Béraud deliberately brings the humming street scene outside into the apartment. Carriages and café tables, lit by many streetlamps and lanterns, seem to be as integral to the scene as the lamps on the console table. In the neighboring apartments beyond, windows are illuminated to suggest figures inside sharing similar moments.
La Conversation takes place in a well-appointed interior, furnished with white painted chairs in the Louis XVI style, a rococo carved gilt wood console table and mirror in the Louis XV style (in which the woman is beautifully reflected). The walls appear to be part of a Louis XV carved, parcel-gilt and white-painted boiserie, similar to the salon ovale de la princesse at the Hôtel de Soubise in Paris. The couple are in evening costume, either having just returned from a ball or party, or about to go to one. Béraud is a master of subtle gestures and he has carefully rendered them here. With his hands grasping the back of the chair with intention, the man tilts back, somewhat awkwardly, perhaps in nervous anticipation. He cranes his head forward as if awaiting a response to his proposition as his companion looks down introspectively. Standing in her extraordinary cornflower blue gown, with a low bustle silhouette, wasp waist, peplum with basques and flounces on her skirt, the position of her hands holding an open fan may reveal a clue to her response.