Jean François Raffaëlli

(French, 1850-1924)

Jardin du Luxembourg

Footnotes

Provenance
with Société des Artistes Français, Paris
with Galerie Adolphe Legoupy, Paris
Jean-François Castex, Paris
Ricardo Antonio Castex, Buenos Aires
Dr. Jorgé Horacio Castex, Buenos Aires
with Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York
with Beadleston Gallery, New York
with Ron Hall Gallery, Palm Beach, Florida
Private collection, UK

Exhibited
Paris, Musée Marmottan-Monet, Jean-François Raffaëlli, no.28

Literature
M. Delafond & C. Genet-Bondeville, Jean-François Raffaëlli, Musée Marmottan-Monet, Paris, 1999, p.62, illustrated in colour p.60

We are grateful to Galerie Brame & Lorenceau for confirming the authenticity of the present lot, which will be included in the digital catalogue raisonné for Jean François Raffaëlli, currently in preparation.

Jean Francois Raffaëlli was born in Paris, and devoted much his career to depicting its population; in his earlier career he chose peasants, rag pickers and workers from the Parisian suburbs, while his later works show more of the affluence of the bourgeoisie, set against the elegant gardens and tree-lined boulevards of the great city.

Raffaëlli first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1870, despite having received no formal training; it was not until the following October that the artist would spend a mere three months studying under Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904) at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His early works were costume pieces, but by 1876 his realist style and depiction of contemporary Parisians had developed.

Raffaëlli's version of realism, which he referred to as caractérisme was championed by the influential critic and novelist J-K Huysmans (1848- 1907) whose own novels, like those of Emile Zola (1840-1902) elicit a style of literary naturalism. As Barbara Fields observes, Raffaëlli 'hoped to set himself apart from those unthinking, so-called realist artists whose art provided the viewer with only a literal depiction of nature. His careful observation of man in his milieu paralleled the anti-aesthetic, anti-romantic approach of...Zola and Huysmans.¹

Edgar Degas (1834-1917) was also a champion of Raffaëlli's work, inviting the artist to participate in the Impressionist exhibitions of 1880 and 1881. This was a divisive move, not least because of the size and volume-some 37 works- that Raffaëlli presented for the 1880 exhibition.

Raffaëlli's style, like his choice of subjects, makes subtle changes as his career develops. His early works have a more precise technique; as one critic wrote in a review of the 1881 Impressionist exhibition, 'M. Raffaëlli seems to us to differ noticeably from the artists known as Impressionists: he paints with an extreme meticulousness, leaves out no detail'². While never considered an Impressionist, despite Degas's best efforts, the works of the 1890s, such as L'hotel de Ville de Paris (1890, Musée Fabre, Montpellier), L'Institute (1897, Musee Carnavalet, Paris) and Les Invalides: Napoleon's Tomb (1895, Musee Carnavale, Paris), begin to show a looser, broader style, often with a scarcity of paint, thinly applied to the background, with a firmer use of line to the figures, buildings and trees.

Stylistically, the present lot is closer to Raffaëlli's masterful Place De L'opéra, Paris (Sotheby's New York, 2 November 2010, lot 38), than to his later works. Painted in 1878, and rejected by the Salon in that year, Place De L'opéra, Paris marked the departure of Raffaëlli's naturalist, rural subjects, and the beginning of his Parisian city-scapes, bustling with life and activity. In Jardin du Luxembourg, well dressed groups of Parisians stroll around the garden basin in front of the Luxembourg Palace. The painting is teeming with activity: a balloon-seller flanked by eager children, a nursemaid pushing a pram, an inquisitive dog, and families strolling arm-in-arm around the famous gardens, all light up an overcast Parisian sky, the whole vista observed with interest by an elderly gentleman standing with his cane in the foreground.

¹J. Turner (ed.), From Monet to Cezanne: Late 19th Century French Artists, Oxford, 2003 (Grove Art Series), p.346
² Le Petit Parisien, 1881