Page 35 - Gallery 19c Volume 3_Les Types de Paris_digital_Neat

Pelez’s attention to incidental detail—the pallor of the
boy’s flesh, the raw red skin around his nose, the filth
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and boniness of his bare feet, his shorn hair (a vestige
of someone’s attempt to eradicate lice), and his sunken
eyes, gazing, trance-like, into space—creates a new kind
of child portrait, and a compelling image of what the
face of poverty in Paris had become.

For Paul Baudry (1828–1886), the future of Paris’s
children was far less bleak. His portrait of Guillemette
de Lareinty, praised by Baudelaire (1821–1867) at
Fig. 4: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, A Girl with a Watering Can, 1876,
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The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. the Salon of 1859, depicts a young girl destined for
greatness, as the next Marquise of Paris (cat. no. 2).
CHILDREN , HIGH AND L O W The animated brushstrokes and loose handling of paint
employed throughout the composition, though unusual
If the figure of the déclassés in Parisian society carried for the artist, sat squarely with contemporary trends: In
connotations of social or familial dis-ease, the image Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886, about
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of the child in 19th-century French art did as well. one in ten pictures had a child as its theme (fig. 4). It
Declining population and birth rates, high child was during this period, in fact, that modern conceptions
mortality, concerns regarding child labor and education, of childhood were formed, with children being
and increasing numbers of abandoned and disadvantaged recognized as beings in their own right, rather than
children in Paris and other urban centers (due in part merely small adults, and with early experiences being
to the economic and political circumstances discussed understood to directly impact later life. As a result,
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above), led to an overwhelming sense of concern for the contemporary literature abounded with discussions of
plight of France’s youth, and of the consequences of the children, both fictional (Hugo’s Les Misérables appeared
country’s modern machinations. Pelez’s Petit Misère ou in 1862) and rigorously scientific (several chapters
Mendiant au Chapeau (cat. no. 18) brings these facts into of Léon Curmer’s eight-volume Les Français peints par
focus, while adding an additional, pessimistic gloss. The eux-mêmes: encyclopédie morale du dix-neuvième siècle [Paris,
little boy wears the oversized clothes of his father, who 1840–2] were devoted to the topic of children, including
is presumably absent from the familial scene. This, in “L’Enfant de Paris” [vol. 2], “Le Gamin de Paris” [vol.
addition to the sober palette and meager, thinly applied 2], and a portion of “Les Pauvres” [vol. 4]). The parallel
paint, suggests that his fate has been sealed—the boy’s popularity of so many texts and images attests to this
life of penury will surely continue through adulthood. cult of modern childhood, in all its wealth and squalor.

32 Fernand Pelez, Petit Misère 33