Page 32 - Gallery 19c Volume 3_Les Types de Paris_digital_Neat

“F OR THOSE . . . DEFEA TED IN More politically provocative are the works of Raffaëlli,
THE GREA T BA T TLE OF LIFE” the definitive painter of the Parisian banlieue (cat. no.
19). Often dressed in the hand-me-down garments of
“Nothing seems simpler than painting peasants, the bourgeoisie, his solitary workers suggest the social
ragpickers and laborers of all kinds, but—no subjects aspirations of the downtrodden laborer, and the class
in paintings are so difficult as these commonplace fluidity that was borne by the Revolution of 1789. 23
figures!” —Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Théo Raffaëlli’s understanding of such subjects may have
van Gogh, July 1885, in The Complete Letters of owed something to personal experience: after repeatedly
Vincent van Gogh, 3rd ed., Boston, 2000, vol. 2, p. 400 advising artists to paint only the things they knew
(“I feel that no artist should paint what he does not
Intersecting the bustling urban pathways and alongside 24
the boulevardiers and the parisiennes they painted was the thoroughly understand”), he attempted to explain the
empathy he felt for his subject matter. “My life has not
darker reality of Parisian city life. Between 1875 and
1884, under the stricter laws of the early Third Republic, been an easy one,” he wrote, “for I was brought up in
luxury until I was fifteen, when within a few years my
more than 75,000 people in France were convicted of
begging, with over 110,000 charged with vagabondage. 19 family lost its entire fortune and I became acquainted
with the most grinding poverty. Then came the war . . .
Such staggering numbers reflected the waves of migrant
peasants and tenant farmers that were descending At that period I painted with the greatest sincerity my
hopelessness, my bitterness, my anger, my madness.
upon Paris, the victims of rural depression and
dispossession, as well as a growing number of foreign It follows then that my art was a violent art, somber,
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bitter, hopeless. I was at that time consumed with the
refugees displaced by recent wars. Fernand Pelez’s
Sans Asile (Homeless) attempts to document one of these greatest pity and commiseration for those who had been
defeated in the great battle of life.” Despite these
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families, shattered by current economic and political
events (cat. no. 17). The artist’s pointed allusion to the sentiments, and the profound influence of his past,
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Raffaëlli went on to warn against conflating an artist
abandonment of this mother and her children (there is
no father figure here), and the careful individualization too closely with his work: “If you paint workers, you are
[considered] a communard-anarchist-socialist-realist-
of each tragic, unsmiling face, cleverly elides the broader 26
issue of bourgeois social responsibility and emphasizes revolutionary . . . and déclassés, you are one yourself.”
Ironically, then, and despite his epic book, it is Raffaëlli
instead the need for Christian charity and compassion,
and the notion of the deserving poor. who offers the clearest—if not only—challenge to
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the efficacy of the label, the category, and the “type,”
through these words and the dignified subjects of his
deliberately equivocal works.

30 Fernand Pelez, Sans Asile 31