Portrait de Jean-Jacques Weiss (1827-1891), rédacteur au "Journal des débats"

Jean Béraud's portrait of Jean-Jacques Weiss (1827–1891), rédacteur at the Journal des Débats (1889), depicts a prominent French journalist and literary critic who was also known as a playwright. Weiss moved in the highest intellectual circles of Paris — he was a friend of Flaubert, Taine, and Renan — and his writing combined literary criticism with political commentary in the manner of the great nineteenth-century French journalists. Béraud, who documented Paris's intellectual elite as well as its street life, brings his observational skill to this portrait of a man deeply embedded in the literary culture of the Third Republic. The work is in the Musée Carnavalet.

Béraud renders Weiss with the directness appropriate to a portrait of an intellectual — face and bearing are the primary subjects, with the handling attentive to the character and intelligence expressed in the features. The composition is focused on the psychological content of the face. Dark background and clear directional light are the main tonal tools.