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PROPERTY OF A LADY

LE PONT DE BERCY

46.5 by 56cm., 18 1/4 by 22in.

PROVENANCE

Sale: Christie's, Glasgow, 2 April 1969, lot 70
Rutland Gallery, London
Purchased from the above by the parents of the present owner; thence by descent

EXHIBITED

London, Rutland Gallery, French and Belgian Painting: Where they meet and diverge, 1969, no. 1 (illustrated in the catalogue)

LITERATURE

Patrick Offenstadt, Jean Béraud 1849-1935, The Belle Epoque: A Dream of Times gone by, Catalogue raisonné, Taschen, 1999, pp. 156-57, no. 160, illustrated

NOTE

Le Pont de Bercy reveals Béraud as the great nineteenth-century painter of modern life. It shows a man and a woman exchanging gossip on the banks of the Seine at Bercy, at that time an outlying area upstream from central Paris still under development. Behind them can be seen the Pont de Bercy, completed in its stone incarnation in 1864 and known then as the Pont de la Gare. The river embankment is still being built up.

If Baron Hausmann reconfigured the city physically, then Jean Béraud mapped the city visually, his paintings suffused with myriad cultural, political and social phenomena of his day. Béraud often claimed 'I find everything but Paris wearisome'.

In an influential 1876 essay entitled 'The New Painting', art critic Edmond Duranty insisted on eliminating the divide separating the artist's studio from that of everyday life, urging artists to introduce the 'reality of the street' into their compositions. In Le Pont de Bercy Béraud took up Duranty's challenge. By capturing everyday life in Paris without picturesqueness or sentimentality, Le Pont de Bercy reflects the early work of Impressionist painters like Manet, Degas and Caillebotte, and novelists such as Emile Zola. From the Impressionists Béraud acquired an interest in the asymmetrical compositions of Japanese prints, then very much in vogue. The present work is composed in ways that may derive from Japanese ukioy-e, with large expanses of blank space, diagonals which cut across the canvas (here in the form of tramlines), and dark figures used as graphic interjections.

Béraud also echoed Impressionist theory in choosing to paint this newer district of Paris. Annexed to the city during the Second Empire, Bercy in the 1870s was in transition, halfway between a small town and a developing residential and commercial quarter. To young painters tired of the artificiality and pretensions of academic art, districts like Bercy and Montmartre were an ideal subject, revealing the truth of modern life.