Waiting, Rue de Chateaubriand, Paris: Jean Béraud
A young woman dressed entirely in black stands at the very edge of a Parisian pavement, turned in profile towards a street that bends away from her and is almost empty. Waiting, Rue de Chateaubriand, Paris, known in French as L'Attente, is an oil on canvas by Jean Béraud in the Musée d'Orsay, where it is registered under the inventory number RF 1977 36. It is a small picture, 55.3 by 39 centimetres in the museum's measurement. Its date is less settled than its subject. A date of about 1900 has been proposed for it, while the Orsay collection record gives no specific year and places the work only within the span of the painter's life. Musée d'Orsay
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| Jean Béraud, Waiting, Rue de Chateaubriand, Paris (L'Attente), oil on canvas, 55.3 × 39 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris, RF 1977 36; anonymous gift, 1935. |
Béraud built the picture from very little. One figure occupies the foreground; a second, tiny and dark, the far pavement beside a street lamp. Between them lies the broad, damp surface of the roadway, and around them a quiet street of walls, railings and shuttered windows. The title names a condition and nothing more, so whom or what the woman expects is left outside the frame.
The Composition of Waiting, Rue de Chateaubriand
Placed close to the left edge of the canvas, the woman fills much of its height. She stands on grey paving slabs at the kerb, her body turned towards the right so that the viewer sees her in profile. The bulk of her skirt gathers behind her, towards the left. Her gaze, and the direction of her whole figure, runs across the street towards its far end.
There the second figure appears: a man in dark clothes and a dark hat, holding a cane, on the corner of the opposite pavement where the street turns out of sight. At this scale it is impossible to tell whether he looks towards her. The painting nevertheless links the two. The kerb line behind the woman, laid in as a dark curving band, carries the eye along the street to the corner where he stands, and the pavement on the right curves round to meet it. These two black verticals, one large and close, the other remote and small, are the only figures in the composition, and the open roadway between them occupies most of the lower right of the canvas.
The architecture is described with some care. Along the left runs a long, blank, cream-coloured wall with a reddish-brown band at its base. Further on, stone piers crowned with urn-shaped finials frame iron railings and gates. Beyond them, a classical door surround and a salmon-coloured door interrupt the wall, and above and behind everything rises a long residential building. Its sloping grey roof is punctuated by skylights and topped by chimney stacks with terracotta pots, and its windows carry louvred shutters, some open and some closed. On the right, a building with a red-brown ground storey and arched openings closes the view. At the far left, a tall pale façade is cut by the frame, with a dark red door or shutter at its foot. A pale, overcast sky fills the upper part of the canvas.
Costume, Hat and Umbrella
Black dominates the figure from hat to hem. The bodice is close-fitting, and a ruffled, fringed cape or collar falls over the shoulders. Arranged in tiers of flounces, the skirt sweeps back into a projecting bustle and extends into a short train, with small heeled shoes visible beneath. The Réunion des musées nationaux indexes the costume in its image database as a robe à tournure, the bustle dress, under the bracket 1860–1900.
The wide-brimmed black hat is the one place where Béraud gives the figure a strong warm colour: a cluster of pink and red flowers sits on its crown. Beneath the brim the face is small and pale, seen in strict profile, with dark hair at the nape. Before her she holds a furled umbrella, upright against the skirt, and a touch of red at its upper part, apparently a ribbon or tie, repeats the colour of the flowers. A closed umbrella, a grey sky and a wet roadway agree with one another. Together they suggest that rain has either just stopped or is expected.
Whether the black reflects fashion or mourning, the painting itself does not decide. It carries no visible inscription, and the woman's identity, if she had one beyond the type, is not recorded in the museum's documentation.
Brushwork, Colour and the Wet Street
Two manners of painting meet on this canvas. The buildings are set down with firm, straight edges and a coherent perspective. Their windows and shutters are reduced to short vertical strokes, and the slope of the roof is marked out in lines of lighter grey. The street is handled much more loosely. In the middle distance the roadway is a sequence of broad, horizontal, fluid strokes in ochre and grey. Nearer the foreground it breaks up into individual setts, patches of blue-grey, grey-green and buff with lighter edges, so that the stones seem to hold water and catch the diffused light.
Painted in dense blacks, the figure has an outline that is never quite hard: the fringes of the cape and the edges of the flounces are worked in small, feathery touches that soften the silhouette against the pale wall behind. The effect is of a dark shape that remains legible as fabric.
Colour is restrained throughout, a range of creams, greys and ochres. Against it Béraud distributes a few warm notes: the flowers on the hat, the red at the umbrella, the salmon door, the terracotta chimney pots and the red-brown base of the building on the right. Scattered across the canvas, these accents tie the small figure in the foreground to the street and houses beyond her.
Dating the Painting
The proposed date of about 1900 and the museum's open dating are not easy to reconcile from the documentary evidence alone. The Orsay record cites no specific date for the work, and the published catalogues it lists, including the summary catalogues of 1986 and 1990, do not change that position on the record itself.
The Musée d'Orsay holds a group of Béraud's works that marks the reach of his career: Une soirée of 1878, La Salle de rédaction du Journal des Débats of 1889, Le Défilé of 1905 and Le Cercle of 1911. Both the 1880s and the first years of the twentieth century therefore fall within his active practice, and the painter's chronology alone cannot narrow the range. Costume offers a little more. The bustle dress, which the Réunion des musées nationaux indexes up to 1900, would make a date at the very end of that bracket less comfortable than an earlier one. Such costume evidence can inform the dating, though documentary confirmation is still needed. The question remains open.
The museum's biographical note on the artist supplies the background. Born in Saint Petersburg, Béraud was the son of a sculptor of the same name. He trained under Léon Bonnat, made his debut at the Salon in 1873, took the daily life of the Parisian bourgeoisie as his principal subject and was among the founders of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. The Orsay gives his dates as 1848–1935. The Réunion des musées nationaux database records 1849 and 1936.
From the Musée du Luxembourg to the Musée d'Orsay
Provenance
The painting came from a private collection. Presented anonymously to the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris in 1935, the year the Orsay gives for the painter's death, it entered the museum on 10 December 1935. It later passed to the Musée national d'Art moderne, under the inventory number AM 2060, and remained there until 1977. A decree of 26 September 1977 then assigned it to the Louvre for the collections of the future Musée d'Orsay. The work is not on display in the galleries at present. Musée d'Orsay
Exhibitions and Readings
L'Attente has travelled widely and been placed in strikingly different company. It was shown in the exhibition of post-Impressionist painting from the national collections at the Palais de Tokyo in 1977–1979, and as number 3 in Jean Béraud et le Paris de la Belle Époque at the Musée Carnavalet in 1999–2000. It went on to Krems in 2005, the Hôtel de Ville in Paris in 2011, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in 2012–2013, and Milan for Manet e la Parigi moderna in 2017. In 2018–2019 it was exhibited in Bonn in Der Flaneur, an exhibition devoted to the figure of the urban stroller.
A further context appears in the bibliography. The painting is listed as catalogue number 9 in Splendeurs et misères. Images de la prostitution 1850–1910, shown at the Musée d'Orsay in 2015–2016, and as number 6 in its Amsterdam counterpart, Easy Virtue, at the Van Gogh Museum in 2016. Its inclusion there suggests that curators have read the picture within the period's uncertainties about how a woman standing alone in the street might be perceived. The canvas does not settle the matter. A respectably dressed figure, an umbrella, a man at a distance and a title that names only an interval of time sustain more than one reading, and Béraud gives no sign of preferring one.
Sources
Musée d'Orsay, collection record for Jean Béraud, L'Attente (RF 1977 36), with provenance, exhibition history and bibliography.
Réunion des musées nationaux – Grand Palais, Images d'Art, L'attente, rue de Chateaubriand, à Paris.