Page 38 - Gallery 19c Volume 3_Les Types de Paris_digital_Neat

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1 Volumes were issued between 1866 and 1876, with two supplements being published in 1877 and 1890.
2 In ethnography, the notion that an ethnic “type” could be recognized through physical and racial,
as well as moral and social characteristics, shifted in the nineteenth century from a purely foreign
paradigm (i.e., the development of an “Oriental” stereotype) to one applicable at home.
3 Tellingly, Jan Goldstein’s classic study of the development of psychiatry in France is titled Console
and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1989).
4 Though Raffaëlli’s collaborative project was unique in many ways, the comprehensive portrayal of
France’s lower classes had begun in 1500, with the Cries of Paris. These anonymous wood engravings
were adapted throughout Europe during the 16th century, culminating in England a century later
with the London Cries. Books of the trades and illustrated costume books, popular during the
Renaissance, may also be considered early versions of Raffaëlli’s iconic work.
5 During the process of Paris’s “Haussmannization,” hundreds of miles of small narrow streets,
especially in the city center, were altered to make way for 85 miles of wide, tree-lined avenues and
boulevards.
6 Once they had arrived on the boulevards, Parisians found themselves with endless opportunities to
parade the newest fashions, observe friends and neighbors, and indulge in the latest urban vogue
- walking. For more on this last subject, see Nancy Forgione, “Everyday Life in Motion: The Art of
Walking in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 87, no. 4, December 2005,
pp. 664–87.
7 “No classicism for Jean Béraud,” wrote one critic of the artist’s near obsessive preoccupation
with the urban scene, “Give him the Boulevard and you may keep the Coliseum,” (Ishmael, “French
Painters ‘Chez Eux’,” The Illustrated American, vol. 3, September 20, 1890, p. 547).
The focus of Béraud and other artists on the urban landscape around them drew largely from the
appeals of the cultural luminaries of the day. Writing in 1824, Stendhal (1783–1842) maintained that
Parisians wished to see “men of today, and not those who probably never existed in those heroic
times so distant from us” (“Salon of 1824”), and two decades later, Baudelaire (1821–1867) echoed and
amplified this view: “[T]he life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects . . . but we do not
notice it” (“On the Heroism of Life,” “Salon of 1846”).
8 Similar to the flâneur, that quintessentially modern nineteenth-century figure famously described
by Baudelaire, the boulevardier was a person of leisure, an observer of the urban scene, and a
frequent stroller along the boulevard.
9 Haussmann’s urban transformations included the introduction of 15,000 gaslights into Paris by
1870, allowing Parisians to venture onto the boulevards after dark, and profoundly affecting the
culture of the city.. The fête foraine was a popular traveling fair featuring rides, games, and acrobatic
entertainments.
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For a discussion of the Parisian woman in art, see Justine Renée De Young, “Women in Black: Fashion,
Modernity and Modernism in Paris, 1860-1890,” Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, Illinois, 2009.
11 Béraud’s recasting of the boulevard as a feminine site – note that none of his parisiennes require
a chaperone – was virtually unprecedented in nineteenth-century French painting; his introduction
too of beggars and men and women of the lower classes stood in stark contrast to the works of his
colleagues, which rarely acknowledged the diversity of the city’s boulevards and streets.
12 There is a strong tradition in late nineteenth-century European art of the marionette and clown;
for an insightful overview, see Ellen H. Branston, “The Significance of the Clown in Paintings by
Daumier, Picasso and Rouault,” Pacific Art Review, 1944, pp. 21–39.
13 A product of art and literature, the image of the dangerously seductive woman, or femme fatale,
flourished in the last decades of the nineteenth century. For more on this popular trope, see
Virginia M. Allen, The Femme Fatale: Exotic Icon, New York, 1983.
14 Alfred Stevens’s Le Biblot exotique (cat. no. 24), for example, one of several of his decorative
Japoniste scenes, only quietly raises the issue of the woman’s status as object or human being.
15 The Camille Sée law of 1880 created a public system in Paris of collèges and lycées for girls, and the
following year primary education was made free for children of both sexes under the Jules Ferry law.
16 Regarding the concerning habits of women readers, Balzac observed: “Car que lisent les femmes?
Des ouvrages passionnés, les Confessions de Jean-Jacques, des romans, et toutes ces compositions
qui agissent le plus puissamment sur leur sensibilité. Elles n’aiment ni la raison ni les fruits mûrs.”
[“For what do women read? Passionate works, the Confessions of Jean-Jacques, novels and all kinds
of compositions that affect their emotions most strongly. They enjoy neither reason nor ripe fruit.”]
(Honoré de Balzac, Physiologie du mariage, in La Comédie humaine, ed. Pierre-Georges Castex, Paris,
1976–81, vol. II, p. 1019).
17 For more on the subject of the liseuse, see Kathryn Brown, Women Readers in French Paintings
1870-1890: A Space for the Imagination, Aldershot, Eng. and Burlington, VT, 2012.
18 Set in the suburbs, a new and important theme in nineteenth-century art and literature, the reference
in Béraud’s painting to Le Figaro is an important one: with the highest circulation of any newspaper
in France, the paper was known for its lively writing style and variety of content, including scandal and
society gossip and a regular column called “À travers Paris,” which took the reader on an imaginative
journey along the city’s boulevards. Even on holiday, then, with this newspaper, the parisienne was
never out of touch.
19 C. J. Ribton-Turner, A History of Vagrants & Vagrancy and Beggars & Begging, London, 1887, p. 533.
Matthias H. Arnot's Picture Gallery., 1913
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