Jean Béraud
1849–1935 · French painter of Belle Époque Parisian life
Jean Béraud (Saint Petersburg, 1849-Paris, 1935) was a French painter whose work depicts everyday life in Paris during the Belle Époque. His interest in urban scenes makes him one of the most recognisable visual chroniclers of the city, although he also painted religious subjects set in a contemporary context.
He was born in Russia, where his father, a sculptor, worked on the St Isaac's Cathedral. After his father's death, the family returned to France and settled in Paris. Béraud initially studied law and practised as a lawyer, but the arrival of the Prussians and the occupation of the capital cut short that career. In 1872 he trained with Léon Bonnat, and the following year he began exhibiting at the Salon. His early works were portraits, until in 1876 The Return from the Funeral brought him recognition with a street scene that observes the gestures of mourning and daily routine with quiet naturalness.
From then on he developed a style of compositions featuring figures in streets, cafés and shops, with a precise eye for urban society. In 1890 he helped found the Société nationale des beaux-arts alongside Rodin, Meissonier and Puvis de Chavannes. That same year he showed La Madeleine in the Pharisee's House, the first of a series of religious paintings that mixed biblical figures with contemporary personalities and puzzled critics. Works such as The Pâtisserie Gloppe and The Newsroom of the Journal des Débats illustrate his record of city life.
His legacy is mainly documentary: a pictorial record of Paris at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After his death in 1935, the Musée Carnavalet paid tribute to him the following year.
Works (9)
In 1891 Jean Béraud painted this scene of the meal at the house of Simon the Pharisee, where Mary Magdalene appears beside Jesus. Béraud moved the gospel episode into a contemporary Parisian interior, with furniture and clothing of his own time, and arranged the guests around the table in an almost genre-painting manner. The oil on canvas is held at the Musée d'Orsay.
Jean Béraud painted this 1889 scene showing the inside of the editorial office of the Journal des Débats, a Parisian newspaper. The composition focuses on journalists absorbed in their work, with figures attending to their desks and moving through the room. Béraud, known for depicting everyday urban life in Paris, turns this workroom into a collective portrait of the people who produced the paper.
This small genre scene, painted in oil on canvas in 1908, shows a couple in a café. One of them smokes, an absinthe glass stands on the table, and someone holds a letter, while a hat adds to the setting. Béraud turns an ordinary moment in the café into a brief story left for the viewer to complete.
In 1877 Jean Béraud painted an urban scene of a Sunday outside the church of Saint-Philippe-du-Roule, on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris. Women, a child and a man walk along the street, with the church façade behind them. The picture captures everyday city life in a calm mood, with an attentive eye for ordinary passersby.
Painted in 1880 by Jean Béraud, this oil on canvas shows the Pont des Arts, the pedestrian footbridge in Paris, on a blustery day. A woman and a man walk across it while the wind seems to tug at their clothing. The subject seems to be an ordinary stroll rather than the bridge itself, with the figures and the gusty weather drawing the viewer's attention.
This small panel by Jean Béraud, dated 1885, shows a Paris street where a woman walks beside an advertising column while a man moves nearby. The scene rests on everyday urban life and on the contrast between figures and architecture. At its modest scale and with restrained brushwork, the painting invites close attention to the rhythm and gestures of the city.
Painting by Jean Béraud dated 1900 and classified as a genre scene. The record describes a tree, a church, a horse-drawn carriage, a woman and a man in a street. The title refers to leaving Mass at the Church of the Holy Trinity, though no further details about its commission or reception are available.
Where to see the work
- Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City · 3
- Musée d'Orsay Paris · 2
- Musée Carnavalet Paris · 1
- National Gallery London · 1
Teachers and pupils
Studied with
- Léon Bonnat 1833–1922
Curiosities
A witness to a duel
In February 1897, Marcel Proust asked him to serve as one of his witnesses in a duel against the writer Jean Lorrain. The cause was an article judged to be abusive. It is an unusual detail that links the painter to one of the great names of French literature of the period, in an episode unrelated to his artistic work.
A twin at birth
Béraud was born on 12 January 1849 with his twin sister, Mélanie, in Saint Petersburg, where his family lived because of his sculptor father's work. They were the youngest children of a large family. Mélanie died in 1927, and was buried near him in the Montparnasse cemetery, in the family plot.