19th Century European Art and Old Masters

Provenance:

Private collection, Scotland

Sold: Christie's, Glasgow, April 2, 1969, Lot 70

Rutland Gallery, London

Private collection, acquired from the above

Thence by descent

Sold: Sotheby's, London, November 16, 2005, Lot 246

MacConnal-Mason & Sons, Ltd., London

Private Collection, acquired from the above by the present owners

Exhibited:

London, Rutland Gallery, French and Belgian Painting Where they Meet and Diverge, 1969, no. 1, illus.

Literature:

Patrick Offenstadt, Jean Béraud 1849-1935, The Belle Epoque, A Dream of Times Gone By, Catalogue Raisonné, 1999, pp. 156-157, no. 160, illus.

Lot essay:

Described as "a sophisticated Parisian who knows where to go and has the gift for observation," Jean Béraud captured in his lively paintings the grand boulevards and stylish denizens of Belle Epoque Paris. Originally trained as an Academic artist, early in his career Beraud was influenced by the Impressionists, with their quick brushstrokes and urban themes. He was a close friend of Edouard Manet and frequented the same cafes as Edgar Degas, Pierre Renoir, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Like them, Béraud sought to objectively convey the modernization of Paris caused by Baron Hausmann's physical reconfiguration of the city.

Le Pont de Bercy displays Béraud's talent for depicting everyday life in Paris without sentimentality or picturesqueness. A man in a blue working smock converses with a smartly but soberly dressed woman. They stand on the banks of the Seine at Bercy, upstream from Paris. Originally a small, separate commune, Bercy was annexed in 1860 by the Second Empire. By the 1870s, it was developing into a residential and commercial quarter of Paris. Behind the couple can be seen the Pont de Bercy, completed in 1864, with a steady stream of traffic. Barges placidly float on the river and an idle work cart stands at the ready along the still incomplete river embankments. From the Impressionists, Béraud also developed an interest in Japanese ukiyo-e prints, with their asymmetrical compositions. In the present work, elements of the Eastern art form can be seen in the artist's use of large expanses of empty space punctuated by dark figures, as well as the diagonal lines of the bridge and tram lines cutting across the canvas.

The candid grouping of the couple, off-center focus, and deep perspective, likewise owe something to the new art of photography pioneered by Nicéphore Niépce, Daguerre, and Fox Talbot. Béraud was known to sit and sketch in a hired carriage for hours in order to capture spontaneous fragments of the city's life, as if he himself was a roving camera. In both its subject matter and compositional structure, Le Pont de Bercy reveals the artist as one of the great nineteenth-century painters of modern life.