Jean Béraud

Peter A. Schemm, Philadelphia (and sold, his sale, Mendelssohn Hall, New York, May 15-17, 1911, no 194, illustrated)
P. W. Rouss
Mrs. P. W. Rouss (and sold, Anderson Galleries, New York, October 22, 1936, lot 30, acquired at the above sale as Paris Salon: Opening Day)
Spencer (acquired at the above sale)
Acquired in 2007

Patrick Offenstadt, Jean Béraud 1849-1935, The Belle Époque: A Dream of Times Gone By, Catalogue Raisonné, Cologne, 1999, p. 136, no. 117, illustrated p. 137

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This work is in lovely condition. The canvas is unlined. The paint layer is conservatively cleaned and there is no damage except for a restoration near the bottom edge in the lower center. Some of the other paint does read quite darkly under ultraviolet light, but this does not appear to be restoration.
"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."

A scrupulous observer of la vie parisienne, Jean Béraud was the quintessential chronicler of Belle Époque Paris. In the present work, he captures a well-known public spectacle of the period, the excited bustle of crowds attending the opening day at the Paris Salon.  The Salon began in the early eighteenth century as a semi-private display of the works of recent graduates of the École des Beaux Arts. By the early nineteenth century, it had become a public exhibition at the Salon Carré of the Louvre, where hundreds of paintings selected by government-sponsored art juries were hung for view. The event became so popular that in 1855 it moved to the immense Palais de l'Industrie, built for that year's World's Fair -- its imposing Gothic entrance looming over the avenue des Champs-Élysées (the building was destroyed in 1897; the same site is now the junction of the avenue Winston Churchill) (Offenstadt, p. 136). Although alternative spaces and private galleries had siphoned some attention from the Salon by the time Béraud completed the present work, an artist's career could still be made or destroyed after each season's opening day, when a crush of critics, connoisseurs, and the public at large flooded into the Palais. Émile Zola famously described the spectacle in his L’Oeuvre (The Masterpiece): “with the passage of years it had become established in Paris that ‘varnishing day,’ originally reserved for artists to put the last finishing touches to their pictures, was an important date in the social calendar.  Now it was one of those acknowledged ‘events’ for which the whole town turned out in full force….  [The artists] fascinated Paris and Paris focused all its interests on them… in one of those sudden, violent, irrepressible crazes that sent swarms of trippers and soldiers and nursemaids elbowing their way through the place… and accounted for the startling figure of fifty thousand visitors on certain fine Sundays” (first published in 1886, Émile Zola, The Masterpiece, trans. Thomas Walton, Ann Arbor, 1998, p. 285).  Similarly, in Béraud's composition, countless gentlemen sporting top-hats and walking sticks and ladies wearing a wide array of the day's best fashions move toward the Palais' imposing façade, some stopping to chat in clusters or await the arrival of companions.  As Béraud suggests, opening day provided attendees the opportunity to show off both chic style and intellectualism; as with so many public events of the late nineteenth century, to be seen at the Salon was just as important as the works one was there to see. Here, Béraud records the modernization of Paris through its sophisticated inhabitants — themselves works of art.