Jean Béraud’s On the Boulevard (Sur le boulevard)
Jean Béraud, On the Boulevard (Sur le boulevard), c. 1880, oil on canvas, 33.4 × 25 cm, Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Jean Béraud’s On the Boulevard ( Sur le boulevard ) compresses the social life of late nineteenth-century Paris into a narrow vertical canvas: pedestrians advance towards the viewer, others drift across the middle distance, shopfronts recede along the right, and a Morris advertising column rises beside the bare tree at the left. The foreground gentleman, impeccably dressed in black and carrying a walking stick, is given almost portrait-like definition; several paces behind him follows a woman in black, while the surrounding crowd is rendered with progressively greater abbreviation. The street itself becomes the principal setting of modern life. There is an important discrepancy in the published data for the painting. The Web Gallery of Art dates On the Boulevard to 1895 and records dimensions of 35 × 25 cm . The current Paris Musées catalogue identifies the same signe...