Walking in Paris

Walking in Paris, dated 1935, is a late Béraud work returning to the most elemental of his subjects: the simple act of walking through the city's streets. The Paris promenade — la flânerie — was both a social ritual and an observational practice, and Béraud's street scenes can be understood as the visual product of the same attentive ambulatory observation that shaped Baudelaire's urban poetry and the Naturalist novel. By 1935 the Paris streets had changed dramatically from the city Béraud had begun documenting in the 1870s — automobiles had replaced fiacres, fashions were entirely different, and the social conventions had shifted — yet Béraud's mode of observation remained consistent: the street as stage, pedestrians as social actors.

Oil on canvas in Béraud's late manner. A 1935 street scene would likely show slightly broader handling in background areas than his early work, but the central figures — walking Parisians, rendered with attention to contemporary 1930s dress and comportment — would maintain his characteristic draftsmanly precision. The street setting provides the familiar compositional structure of his long career.