Two carriages draw level on a wet avenue, near enough for their occupants to talk across the narrow gap between the wheels. This moment forms the subject of Jean Béraud's Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées, an oil on panel measuring 37.4 by 56.2 centimetres and signed at the lower right. In the immediate foreground Béraud places the meeting, while behind it the avenue climbs through grey, leaf-strewn air towards the Arc de Triomphe. The picture belongs to the large body of Parisian street scenes that Béraud (1849–1935) produced in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Widely reproduced with a date of about 1880, the painting itself gives little support to that dating.
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| Jean Béraud, Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées, oil on panel, 37.4 × 56.2 cm, signed lower right. A light cabriolet and a coachman-driven carriage meet on the avenue in late autumn, with the Arc de Triomphe closing the view at the Étoile. |
Its modern history, insofar as it can be followed securely, comes largely from the sale room. A panel with this title, whose catalogue entry describes exactly this exchange between carriages under the Arc, was offered at Sotheby's New York on 22 May 2019. It had been in a private Italian collection since around 1930 and passed by descent. In 2011 it was lent to the exhibition Boldini e la Belle Époque at the Villa Olmo in Como. Patrick Offenstadt, whose catalogue raisonné of Béraud appeared in Cologne in 1999, confirmed its authenticity and planned to include it in a supplement to that catalogue.
From the Rond-Point to the Étoile
The title fixes the viewpoint precisely. At the Rond-Point, the circular crossing laid out with flower beds and fountains, the garden-lined lower stretch of the Champs-Élysées coming from the Place de la Concorde meets the built-up avenue that rises to the Place de l'Étoile. Up that rising stretch looks Béraud. The Arc de Triomphe closes the vista as a pale block, flattened and almost weightless in the mist. The most famous object in the painting, it is also one of the least substantial.
The two sides of the avenue are handled differently. On the left, a double line of trees recedes in a soft brown blur. Carriages are spaced along the roadway beneath them and shrink from legible cabs with drivers and horses to dark notations, then to a smudge just short of the arch. At the left edge a man in a grey overcoat strides across the foreground, one arm swinging forward. On that side, he is the only pedestrian given any weight.
On the right, the buildings form a denser edge. A corner block of dressed stone fills the upper right, with tall windows, balconies, a mansard roof broken by dormers, clustered chimney stacks and a small domed pavilion at the angle. Further off, a row of similar façades recedes, each one paler than the last. Gas lamp-posts stand along the pavement. At the far right a strip of green lawn, perhaps part of the planted beds of the Rond-Point itself, carries a small crowd: a woman in a long white apron, a small dog on the path, men in top hats, a figure walking away with a cane. Small and quickly brushed, these details place the scene on an ordinary afternoon of a fashionable quarter at work and at leisure.
The season is also clear. Nearly bare, the trees retain only a few russet leaves, while fallen leaves lie on the roadway as scattered touches of orange and ochre. According to a study of Béraud's Champs-Élysées subjects, at least forty-one of his works show the avenue and its surroundings, and eight of these are painted on panel. The autumnal version is one of several moods he found for the same stretch of road.
Two Carriages Meet on the Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées
The foreground is organised with some cunning. Both vehicles advance almost straight towards the viewer, so the horses are seen nearly head-on and the bodies of the carriages recede behind them. Into the gap between the two teams falls the central axis of the panel. That gap is where the glances cross: the social event of the picture happens in an empty space of wet road.
The light carriage on the left
The smaller vehicle on the left is open, with a dark lacquered body, a carriage lamp at the front and curved ironwork around the seat. The Sotheby's cataloguers identify it as a cabriolet. Two figures sit in it. The nearer, in a pale fawn coat, wears a low-crowned brown hat, a bright red cravat and a yellow flower at the lapel. Youthful and smooth, the face turns with a half-smile towards the other carriage. Beside this figure sits a companion in a top hat and a dark buttoned overcoat, whose round face looks out more directly and whose gloved hands reach forward over the front of the vehicle. Across the pair slants a long whip.
The Sotheby's catalogue reads the fawn-coated figure as a woman driving her own carriage, with a man as her passenger. The costume makes the reading plausible, since it borrows the hat, cravat and buttonhole of male riding and driving dress. The catalogue places the image within a documented social change. From the 1850s onwards, it notes, women's driving moved from country outings to quiet morning drives in Paris. By the 1880s, women regularly took the reins in heavy afternoon traffic. This development was recorded in 1892 by "Croqueville", the pseudonym of the Duchess of Fitz-James, in Paris en voiture, à cheval, aux courses, à la chasse. The catalogue also points ahead to 1907, when the first professional women cab drivers, the femmes cochers, appeared on Paris streets. Béraud's figure is private, fashionable and assured, and is two decades away from that professional status. The driver receives no explanatory emphasis; costume and half-smile carry the point.
The lady in black and the coachman
More formal in every respect is the larger carriage on the right. A liveried coachman sits high on the box in a top hat and a double-breasted fawn coat with bright buttons. His gloved hands are gathered together over the reins, the whip rising from them. He looks straight ahead with the impassivity his employment requires. The dark body of the carriage has its own lamp and polished fittings; its spoked wheels, small highlights.
Lower down and nearer the gap sits a young woman dressed almost entirely in black. Her high collar and the front of her bodice are trimmed with gold. The upper sleeves swell out broadly at the shoulder before narrowing to the forearm, and she wears a wide pale hat with white plumes. She leans a little towards the other vehicle and returns its occupant's look. Her gloved hands rest together at her waist, holding a small bright object that the brushwork does not define. Her face, the most carefully finished passage in the panel, is lit against the black mass of the carriage and bonnet and becomes the point where the eye stops.
The encounter itself remains open. Nothing in the image tells us whether the two women are friends, acquaintances or strangers exchanging a glance. The Sotheby's catalogue calls such a meeting between carriages an ordinary sight of the period, while Béraud's arrangement gives it an air of interrupted conversation. The coachman ignores it; the dark-coated passenger seems to be looking elsewhere.
Horses, Harness and the Painter's Knowledge of Equipage
Horses were the great test of the Parisian street painter, and Béraud meets it with evident knowledge. The horse on the left is a dark chestnut shown almost frontally. On the right, a bay with a black mane turns slightly towards the edge, its head lifted and its neck arched against the bit. Each lifts a foreleg high, the knee sharply flexed, in the elevated trot of carriage horses bred and schooled for show. The hooves are heavy dark shapes, their reflections falling straight down into the wet road beneath them.
The harness receives the same attention. The blinkers are fitted with small gilt ornaments at the brow. Broad black collars and breast straps, the traces, the pale gleam of metal fittings mark out the load that each animal draws. Diagonally across the chestnut's flank cut the shafts of the left-hand vehicle. Partly hidden behind the bay's body sits the front of the right-hand carriage, so that horse and vehicle read as a single forward mass. In a scene where the figures are small, the two teams take up most of the foreground. The painting is also a picture of expensive equipage, and its first viewers would have read the quality of a turnout as readily as the cut of a coat.
Wet Paving, Grey Light and Paint on Panel
Béraud's palette here is narrow: buff and grey-violet in the road and sky, greys and pale creams in the buildings, brown in the trees and horses, the deep blacks of the carriages and the lady's dress. Colour appears in small concentrated notes, such as the red cravat, the yellow buttonhole, the gold trim at the black collar and the scattered orange leaves. Elsewhere the tonal range is kept close, giving the scene its damp, overcast quality.
The roadway is the most freely painted area. Long, loosely curving strokes follow the tracks of earlier wheels. Beneath the horses and wheels, short vertical drags suggest reflections on a wet surface; between them, flecks of lighter paint catch the light. The smooth wooden support suits this handling, since the brush slides across it and the strokes stay distinct. In the figures and the harness the same hand works much more tightly, with small precise touches for buckles, buttons and the details of the faces. Characteristic of Béraud is this combination of a loosely handled setting with closely described people. He trained under the portraitist Léon Bonnat, exhibited at the Salon from 1872, and developed a manner of his own between academic finish and the brighter, broken touch of the Impressionists.
Contemporaries noticed how he worked. Offenstadt's catalogue raisonné quotes the journalist Paul Hourie, who argued that scenes from everyday life had to be caught in their real setting, away from studio conventions. Béraud, in Hourie's account, spent his days in carriages searching for a subject. A carriage used as a mobile studio would place the painter at almost exactly the eye level of this panel, among the traffic and facing the approaching horses. Whether this particular panel was begun on the spot cannot be known. Its viewpoint, however, is plainly that of someone who was himself on the road.
At the lower right, the signature Jean Béraud. is written in dark paint with a flourished underline. On the wet surface of the avenue it sits like one more mark on the road.
Dating the Painting
When was the panel painted? The date of about 1880 that circulates with most reproductions has no evident documentary source. The Sotheby's catalogue of 2019 did not print a date. The painting's internal evidence points somewhat later. The lady in black wears sleeves that swell out sharply at the shoulder, together with a broad plumed hat. Both belong to women's fashion of the mid-1890s more readily than to the slimmer silhouettes of the early 1880s. The social phenomenon described in the Sotheby's catalogue, women driving themselves through afternoon traffic, is said to have become routine by the 1880s, and it was still recent enough in 1892 to deserve a published account.
Costume can only narrow the possibilities. A year it cannot fix, and fashionable dress in Béraud's scenes is usually current and reliable, though not infallible. Until Offenstadt's supplement or other documentation settles the question, the Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées is most safely placed broadly in the 1890s, while "circa 1880" remains a convention of reproduction whose documentary basis is unestablished.
(The translation was edited by E. Wilson.)
