La rue Rataud

The rue Rataud was a small street in the 5th arrondissement near the Val-de-Grâce, a district that retained much of its seventeenth and eighteenth-century character into the twentieth century. Unlike the commercial and industrial streets of the Bièvre valley, the rue Rataud was a quieter residential street, and Bonneton's composition reflects a calmer, more spacious character appropriate to its bourgeois-residential neighborhood near the Latin Quarter. The Musée Carnavalet held several Bonneton views of Paris streets and waterways across its collections of Parisian topography, making his work a significant contribution to the visual history of the city at the turn of the century. This view complements the Bièvre industrial series with a more genteel face of old Paris.

The composition is quieter and more spacious than Bonneton's Bièvre views, with the street opening at its center in a manner that creates a more conventional perspectival recession. The palette shifts slightly warmer here, with more cream and buff stone replacing the grey masonry of the working-class quarters.