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Lot Essay
Jean Béraud’s pictures of the bustling streets of Parisian life serve as a unique window into the Belle Époque. He began his artistic training under the supervision of Léon Bonnat. Despite his academic training, he quickly adopted a more impressionistic style, using expressive brushstrokes and kinetic figures.
Fashionable costume is a fixture of almost all of Béraud’s pictures and whether intentionally or not they chronicle one of the most seismic shifts of the Belle Époque. Parisian haute couture at the turn of the 20th Century reflected an increasingly international clientele, as fashion became a marker of global wealth and cosmopolitan identity rather than national or social distinction. Women were also increasingly entering the trade as seamstresses or shopkeepers, ushering in a new lower-middle class. As Susan Hiner notes ‘Béraud’s painting captures the time and place where producer meets consumer and fashionability has been democratized’ (A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Age of Empire, London, 2017, p. 35).
The present picture highlights the visibility of these new women, who browse and shop unchaperoned outside Maison Doucet, one of the most popular fashion houses on the rue de la Paix in Paris. A woman dressed in a form-fitting bodice and veiled hat watches-on as boxed garments are loaded into a coach, meanwhile similarly finely dressed ladies sporting paletots and bustle skirts glance at the merchandise in the storefront window. The women in the scene are equally fashionable, distinctions of class or background are obscured by their shared styles.
Maison Doucet was owned by Jacques Doucet, a designer and prominent art collector of predominantly Post-Impressionist and Cubist works, who acted as a ‘patron and protector’ of Béraud during his lifetime (Jean Béraud, The Belle Époque: A Dream of Times Gone By, Cologne, 1999, p. 154).
Fashionable costume is a fixture of almost all of Béraud’s pictures and whether intentionally or not they chronicle one of the most seismic shifts of the Belle Époque. Parisian haute couture at the turn of the 20th Century reflected an increasingly international clientele, as fashion became a marker of global wealth and cosmopolitan identity rather than national or social distinction. Women were also increasingly entering the trade as seamstresses or shopkeepers, ushering in a new lower-middle class. As Susan Hiner notes ‘Béraud’s painting captures the time and place where producer meets consumer and fashionability has been democratized’ (A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Age of Empire, London, 2017, p. 35).
The present picture highlights the visibility of these new women, who browse and shop unchaperoned outside Maison Doucet, one of the most popular fashion houses on the rue de la Paix in Paris. A woman dressed in a form-fitting bodice and veiled hat watches-on as boxed garments are loaded into a coach, meanwhile similarly finely dressed ladies sporting paletots and bustle skirts glance at the merchandise in the storefront window. The women in the scene are equally fashionable, distinctions of class or background are obscured by their shared styles.
Maison Doucet was owned by Jacques Doucet, a designer and prominent art collector of predominantly Post-Impressionist and Cubist works, who acted as a ‘patron and protector’ of Béraud during his lifetime (Jean Béraud, The Belle Époque: A Dream of Times Gone By, Cologne, 1999, p. 154).