Further Images
| Medium | Gouache on board |
| Signed | Signed lower left and dated |
| Size | 19.00" × 38.00" (48.3cm × 96.5cm) |
| Framed Size | 24.00" × 43.00" (61.0cm × 109.2cm) |
| Dated | 1904 |
| Condition | Very good condition |
| Provenance | Private collection - France |
| About this Painting | Rain has just passed, and the wide pavement of the Boulevard Barbès glistens pink and grey beneath a pearl-white sky. A crowd streams past the great lit windows of the Grands Magasins Dufayel — top-hatted gentlemen, women in furs and feathered hats, a small child in white, a red-trousered sergent de ville pausing to talk, and a flower-seller with her basket of violets. A green omnibus à impériale sways behind its horses, a Morris column and a domed newspaper kiosk punctuate the middle distance, and the ironwork of a Métropolitain entrance anchors the foreground. Galien-Laloue orchestrates it all in his inimitable gouache: opaque and silvery, flecked with sparks of pure colour and the tiny white highlights that make his wet Paris shimmer at the hour the lamps come on. The setting is exact. This is the Dufayel store in the working-class 18th arrondissement — founded in 1856, rebuilt by Georges Dufayel beneath a vast glass dome whose searchlight swept the Paris sky, and celebrated for pioneering purchase on credit, for its theatre, cinema and winter garden, and for the little posy of flowers pressed on every departing customer. At its height it was billed as the largest department store in the world. Galien-Laloue is the definitive chronicler of Belle Époque Paris, and the boulevard after rain is his signature subject. What sets this sheet apart is its scale: at 19 x 38 inches it is the largest-format work known in his oeuvre, roughly 6 times the size of his usual gouaches — a very rare survival, and a commanding one. |
£22,000.00
GBP
