Esquisse pour la salle des fêtes de l'Hôtel de Ville de Paris : La Ville de Paris conviant le monde à ses fêtes

Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant's sketch for the Festival Hall at the Paris Hôtel de Ville presents the City of Paris inviting the world to her celebrations — an appropriate subject for a building whose festival functions were a key element of Third Republic civic life. Benjamin-Constant was deeply influenced by Orientalist aesthetics absorbed during his travels in Morocco, and he brought a taste for saturated color and architectural grandeur to his French civic commissions. The personification of Paris as a welcoming queen, summoning nations to her festivities, encapsulates the city's self-conception as cultural capital of the world at the time of the 1889 Universal Exposition.

Benjamin-Constant's Orientalist influence manifests even in a civic French allegory: the richness of the palette, the architectural splendor of the setting, and the dramatic deployment of light and shadow give the sketch a theatrical intensity unusual in conventional republican allegory.