1849 -1935 · Saint Petersburg and Paris

Wet boulevards, cafes, elegant and crowds in a hurry make Jean Béraud the incisive chronicler of modern Paris and the Belle Époque.

Jean Béraud was born in Saint Petersburg in 1849 into a French family; his father works there as a sculptor. After his death, the family returned to Paris. Béraud studied with Léon Bonnat at the École des beaux-arts and exhibited at the Salon from 1872. The success of Retour de l'burier in 1876 permanently oriented his career towards contemporary life. He often set up a small mobile workshop in a car in order to directly observe streets, passers-by, cabs, cafes and construction sites. His paintings precisely identify the places: boulevard des Capucines, place de la Concorde, Champs-Élysées, quays, theater exits and crossroads on the right bank. This accuracy topographic does not, however, produce simple postcards. Béraud organizes looks, movements and social differences to make the street a theater. In Boulevard des Capucines, cars and walkers set the pace of a Paris transformed by major works and urban leisure activities. Stage from Place de la Concorde combines monument, traffic and elegant silhouettes in an immediately recognizable space. At the café, known as L'Absinthe moves observation inwards: drink, attitude and silence suggest solitude at the heart of modern sociability. The Fencer shows an active, focused and free woman from poses conventional social portraits. Béraud also painted clubs, salons, religious scenes transposed into contemporary Paris and portraits of writers or journalists. Co-founder of the National Society of Fine Arts in 1890, he exhibited there for nearly forty years. Died in Paris in 1935, he left a visual chronicle where documentary precision, social irony and pictorial elegance remained inseparable. The "Jean Béraud" selection notably compares L’Escrimeuse and Boulevard des Capucines. His reading favors space.

Béraud transforms Paris into a mobile scene: a cab, a look or a glass placed on the table is enough to reveal the rhythms, desires and solitudes of the modern city.