Page 24 - G19C Maastricht Catalog

Fernand Pelez

YOUNG BEGGAR WITH HAT (PETIT MISÈRE)

In December 1913, just a few months after Fernand Pelez’s death, Pelez’s fascination with naturalistically depicting the pathos and
an exhibition of his most important works was held in his studio vulnerability of the urban lower classes distinguishes him from
at the foot of Montmartre in Paris. A reproduction of this painting his more well-remembered contemporaries such as Jules Bastien-
depicting a young street urchin wearing a grown-man’s threadbare Lepage whose naturalistically depicted the laboring classes in rural,
jacket and holding an equally oversized bourgeois top hat, his rather than urban, milieus. Some scholars have compared Pelez’s
delicate skin tones overlaid with a veil of dirt, adorned the cover of works to contemporaneous images of the urban lower classes by
the catalogue. It was accompanied by a single word: “misère.” Georges Seurat, Edgar Degas, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, however
their stylistic concerns differ considerably. Known widely in his
While this term in French usually translates as simply physical day, this artist working on the fringes of the Parisian avant-garde
poverty, in the 19th century “misère,” as Linda Nochlin has shown, occupies an incomparable position as the chronicler of the Belle
connoted a condition of “poverty felt morally" and bearing upon Époque’s other side – its marginalized, its destitute, its down-and-
all humanity. First shown at the Salon of 1886, this painting out, and its forgotten. It is for this reason that recent interest has
entitled Petit Misère, combines meticulous detail with emotional been revived and collected around the spectacular paintings of
distance so as to elicit a broadly sympathetic view of the conditions Fernand Pelez who, in 1901, described each of his works such as Petit
of the industrial underclass. Rather than depicting a narrative Misère as individual pages in the book describing Paris’ misérables.
scene, misery is here conveyed through the young boy’s physical
appearance, his scavenged and tattered clothing, and physical
proximity to the viewer in the shallow space of the picture. Lacking
the idealization of the history painting or religious martyr scenes
upon which he was trained, Pelez painted this figure naturalistically
and almost as if “there is mud in his brush,” as the critic Émile
Henriot described it. The young boy stands in the doorway of
Pelez’s studio at 62 Boulevard de Clichy, appearing as though the
artist had just encountered this familiar figure on the street. Yet his
vacant stare combined with the thin, flat application of paint in a
retrained, neutral palette suggests that perhaps this figure represents
one of Paris’ most recognizable types – the gamin, or the street
urchin – rather than a distinct individual. A favorite trope in visual
and literary discourse of the later 19th century, the gamin was so
thoroughly embedded in the legibility of the modern city that Victor
Hugo proclaimed in the 1862 novel, Les Misérables, that “[T]he gamin
stands for Paris.”

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