19th Century European Art
19th Century European Art
Lot Closed
June 11, 04:03 PM GMT
Estimate
40,000 - 60,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
JEAN-FRANÇOIS RAFFAËLLI
French
1850 - 1924
ELÉGANTE AU CHIEN
signed JFRAFFAËLLI (lower right)
oil on canvas
canvas: 33 ⅜ by 17 ⅞ in.; 85 by 45.5 cm
framed: 40 ¾ by 25 ¼ in.; 103.5 by 54.1 cm
We thank Galerie Brame & Lorenceau for kindly confirming the authenticity of this work, which will be included in their forthcoming Jean-François Raffaëlli computerized catalogue critique now in preparation.
Sale: Tajan, Drouot, Paris, November 16, 2001, lot 109, illustrated
Stair Sainty Gallery, London
Walter Kaye
Earlier in his career, Jean-François Raffaëlli was primarily concerned with representing and exploring the individual character of the working class rag pickers, street sweepers and wood cutters in the Parisian suburb of Asnières. After he gained fame in the Impressionist exhibitions of 1880 and 1881, and later relocated to a city studio on the rue de Courcelles, the artist turned his attention towards the leisure class of Paris, producing street scenes where élégantes mingled with chiffoniers and fabricants. Of this transition, Raffaëlli said: “I work according to the humor of the moment… Today I am an optimist, and my paintings that you can see on the Champ-de-Mars are joyful. I have fallen in love with light!... My mode of working, I repeat, follows the whims of my humor and I think it must be so" (“Raffaëlli, champ-de-Mars,” Le Figaro, May 27, 1896, translated from the French as quoted in Marianne Delafond and Caroline Genet-Bondeville, Jean François Raffaëlli, exh. cat., Musée Marmottan-Monet, Paris, 1999, p. 49).
Painted with finesse, the present work is a showcase for Raffaëlli's confident brushwork and use of a sophisticated, shifting palette of whites, greys, and blacks in the figure’s costume and gloves, with pops of yellow-golds in her hair, hat ornament and chain echoed in the collar of her canine companion. A spare yet expressive use of paint suggests the carpet and mouldings of a bourgeois interior, as the élégante looks out at the viewer while she pulls up her gauzy glove to depart for a promenade on the bustling boulevards. The seeming spontaneity of the subject, as if photographed mid-movement, reveals the influence of Edgar Degas on Raffaëlli, one of his most talented protégés, among other Impressionists. The composition's fashionable figure, coloration, attention to detail and the subtle narrative all contributes to Raffaëlli’s fabulously captivating portrait of the caractérisme of Belle Époque Paris.