“La Parisienne”

She is turning slightly, as if aware of being watched, but not quite acknowledging it — a posture Jean Béraud (1849–1936) understood completely and returned to throughout his career. La Parisienne is one of his essential subjects: the fashionable woman of the Belle Époque, rendered with the precision and pleasure of a painter who moved through the same Parisian world she inhabited and who observed it with the equal parts admiration and irony. The costume tells the story of around 1890 with documentary accuracy. The dark navy jacket with its elaborate textured fabric and white fur collar. The deep teal-green skirt with its layers and sweep. The elaborate hat — auburn straw, adorned with gilded feathers — set at precisely the correct angle. The black gloves, one hand holding a muff. The pointed dark boots just visible below the hem. Béraud painted these details with the eye of a man who had close friends among the milliners and dressmakers of Paris and who understood that in this world, dress was not vanity but identity. The paint handling is confident and varied — thicker impasto in the jacket's textured fabric, smoother passages in the skirt and gloves, the face and fur collar handled with particular delicacy against the pale, atmospheric background. Born in Saint Petersburg to French parents in 1849, Béraud moved to Paris after his father's death and studied under Léon Bonnat at the École des Beaux-Arts. He abandoned law for painting at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War and never looked back. By the 1890s his name was synonymous with Paris — close friends with Manet, Degas and Renoir, a regular at the major Salons, awarded the Légion d'Honneur in 1894. He was described by a contemporary critic as the painter for whom "Paris is his passion, his mistress, his idol." His work is held in the Musée d'Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Tate in London. This panel was sold at Christie's New York in April 2004 (Lot 183) and at Christie's London in April 2013 (Lot 236), forming part of the celebrated Au bord de la Mer collection from Saint-Tropez.