Moving house

Moving House of 1905 depicts one of the most disruptive and visually chaotic events in the life of a Paris apartment — the déménagement. In late nineteenth and early twentieth century Paris, moving day (traditionally organized around the rent calendar) was a city-wide social phenomenon, with furniture, personal effects, and entire household contents transported through the streets by professional movers. Béraud's choice of this subject reveals his interest in the transient, disruptive moments of Parisian life that interrupted the city's usual social performance. Moving house created a temporary breach in the privacy of domestic life, making public what was normally concealed — furniture, belongings, family arrangements — in a way that the social observer would find irresistible.

Oil on canvas with a compositionally unusual subject — the furniture and boxes of a move create irregular, non-architectural forms in the street or stairwell setting. Béraud's precise figure rendering extends to the movers and watching neighbors, while the displaced domestic objects require a different kind of observational attention than his usual fashionably dressed pedestrians.