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Lot Essay
(fig. 1) Jean-Franois Raffalli, Le Bonhomme venant de peindre sa Barrire, (Delteil 55), drypoint, 1904
(fig. 2) Jean-Franois Raffalli, Les dclasss (Also known as Les buveurs d'absinthe), Private Collection.
Raffalli's art defies categorization and one could call him a Realist or a Naturalist just as easily as one could label him an Impressionist. He was an Impressionist by virtue of his association with the group, not necessarily by his style. As it was for Degas, Raffalli's great love and discipline was line; he was a draftsman before anything else. And it was his drawing technique, his method of combining charcoal, pastel, oil and pencil, that dominated his painting style. Like many artists of his generation, he was also a talented printmaker (fig. 1). By the time Raffalli died in 1924, his fame had spread across the Atlantic where he held exhibitions in New York and Boston as early as 1895. In his review in Le Figaro on April 10, 1881, the critic Albert Wolff wrote: " Like Millet he [Raffalli] is the poet of the humble. What the great master did for the fields, Raffalli begins to do for the modest people of Paris. He shows them as they are, more often then not stupefied by life's hardships."
Raffalli was strongly influenced by the writings of the Goncourts, Balzac and especially Zola. One is immediately struck by the similarities between the protagonists in Zola's great novels from the Rougon-Macquart series, especially the central figures in l'Assommoir, and the subjects of Raffalli's paintings, who are frequently the workers and beggars of the Paris suburbs, known as the dclasses (fig. 2). Raffalli left Paris in 1878, and settled in Asnires, an industrial suburb, where he could study his subjects firsthand. His primary concern was the character of the individual he depicted. "Character", he wrote, "is the physiological and psychological constitution of man...Character is man's distinctive trait." (J.F. Raffalli, "Etude des mouvements de l'art moderne et du beau caractriste", Catalogue illustr des oeuvres de J.F. Raffalli exposs 28 bis, Avenue de l'Opra, Paris, 1884, pp. 66-67) To illustrate this concept, Raffalli chose to depict his figures - ragpickers, beggars, chimney sweepers and garlic sellers, among others - in passive, almost reflective moments rather than involved in the activity of their labors.
Raffalli had been successful in the Paris Salon system, especially with his 1877 entry depicting a Breton family; however, at the insistence of his good friend, Edgar Degas, he decided to show with the Impressionist artists in their group exhibitions in 1880 and 1881. He was represented by forty-one works in 1880 and thirty-three in 1881. Included as number 122 in the 1881 exhibition - the sixth show organized by the renegade group of painters known as the Impressionists was Raffalli's Bonhomme venant de peindre sa barrire. Characteristic of Raffalli's best depictions of individual types, he isolates his subject in his environment. The central figure is a portly blue-collar worker. With paint brush and can in hand, he has just finished painting a green fence. As in most of his figure paintings, there is no action, and activity has ceased while his subject pauses for a moment of contemplation. In the distance is a river (the Seine or the Marne) where some industrial activity is taking place. We see barges on the river, carts loaded with coal and a smokestack. This type of scene represented the new "countryside" of the Paris suburbs, the true, new landscape of the industrial revolution, which was the impetus for so much of Raffalli's creativity, as it also was for Monet in paintings such as his Gare Saint Lazare series.
Raffalli's strong presence in the Impressionist exhibitions of 1880 and 1881 advanced the notion of Realism as a significant characteristic of Impressionism to new levels. Even Degas's entries in 1881 pushed the limits of Realism (almost bordering on a "Zolaesque" scientific
interpretation), as he chose to include head studies of convicted murderers. Degas was criticized for his support of Raffalli by artists like Caillebotte, who felt that the essential, pastoral character of Impressionism was being threatened. Indeed, it was the addition of Raffalli 's works that spoke most clearly and openly of a new industrial age, and declaimed the emergence of a harsh and inescapable social milieu that artists of substance could not ignore. While a century and more later we look back upon the art of this era as an idyllic movement which delighted in the pleasures of light and nature, this was but one concept of a complex artistic revolution, which had at its root and core a new way of seeing man's relationship to society, and society's place within nature.
(fig. 2) Jean-Franois Raffalli, Les dclasss (Also known as Les buveurs d'absinthe), Private Collection.
Raffalli's art defies categorization and one could call him a Realist or a Naturalist just as easily as one could label him an Impressionist. He was an Impressionist by virtue of his association with the group, not necessarily by his style. As it was for Degas, Raffalli's great love and discipline was line; he was a draftsman before anything else. And it was his drawing technique, his method of combining charcoal, pastel, oil and pencil, that dominated his painting style. Like many artists of his generation, he was also a talented printmaker (fig. 1). By the time Raffalli died in 1924, his fame had spread across the Atlantic where he held exhibitions in New York and Boston as early as 1895. In his review in Le Figaro on April 10, 1881, the critic Albert Wolff wrote: " Like Millet he [Raffalli] is the poet of the humble. What the great master did for the fields, Raffalli begins to do for the modest people of Paris. He shows them as they are, more often then not stupefied by life's hardships."
Raffalli was strongly influenced by the writings of the Goncourts, Balzac and especially Zola. One is immediately struck by the similarities between the protagonists in Zola's great novels from the Rougon-Macquart series, especially the central figures in l'Assommoir, and the subjects of Raffalli's paintings, who are frequently the workers and beggars of the Paris suburbs, known as the dclasses (fig. 2). Raffalli left Paris in 1878, and settled in Asnires, an industrial suburb, where he could study his subjects firsthand. His primary concern was the character of the individual he depicted. "Character", he wrote, "is the physiological and psychological constitution of man...Character is man's distinctive trait." (J.F. Raffalli, "Etude des mouvements de l'art moderne et du beau caractriste", Catalogue illustr des oeuvres de J.F. Raffalli exposs 28 bis, Avenue de l'Opra, Paris, 1884, pp. 66-67) To illustrate this concept, Raffalli chose to depict his figures - ragpickers, beggars, chimney sweepers and garlic sellers, among others - in passive, almost reflective moments rather than involved in the activity of their labors.
Raffalli had been successful in the Paris Salon system, especially with his 1877 entry depicting a Breton family; however, at the insistence of his good friend, Edgar Degas, he decided to show with the Impressionist artists in their group exhibitions in 1880 and 1881. He was represented by forty-one works in 1880 and thirty-three in 1881. Included as number 122 in the 1881 exhibition - the sixth show organized by the renegade group of painters known as the Impressionists was Raffalli's Bonhomme venant de peindre sa barrire. Characteristic of Raffalli's best depictions of individual types, he isolates his subject in his environment. The central figure is a portly blue-collar worker. With paint brush and can in hand, he has just finished painting a green fence. As in most of his figure paintings, there is no action, and activity has ceased while his subject pauses for a moment of contemplation. In the distance is a river (the Seine or the Marne) where some industrial activity is taking place. We see barges on the river, carts loaded with coal and a smokestack. This type of scene represented the new "countryside" of the Paris suburbs, the true, new landscape of the industrial revolution, which was the impetus for so much of Raffalli's creativity, as it also was for Monet in paintings such as his Gare Saint Lazare series.
Raffalli's strong presence in the Impressionist exhibitions of 1880 and 1881 advanced the notion of Realism as a significant characteristic of Impressionism to new levels. Even Degas's entries in 1881 pushed the limits of Realism (almost bordering on a "Zolaesque" scientific
interpretation), as he chose to include head studies of convicted murderers. Degas was criticized for his support of Raffalli by artists like Caillebotte, who felt that the essential, pastoral character of Impressionism was being threatened. Indeed, it was the addition of Raffalli 's works that spoke most clearly and openly of a new industrial age, and declaimed the emergence of a harsh and inescapable social milieu that artists of substance could not ignore. While a century and more later we look back upon the art of this era as an idyllic movement which delighted in the pleasures of light and nature, this was but one concept of a complex artistic revolution, which had at its root and core a new way of seeing man's relationship to society, and society's place within nature.