Alon Zakaim Fine Art

Jean Béraud was a French painter born in St Petersburg in 1849. His father was a sculptor who moved his family to St Petersburg in order to work on the church of St Isaac. Béraud lived in Russia until his father’s death in 1853, when he returned to Paris aged just 4 years.

He initially intended to become a lawyer, beginning his studies at the Faculty of Law of Paris. Yet with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war and the invasion of Paris by the Prussians in 1870, Béraud’s studies were cut short, putting an end to his aspirations in the law.

Deciding to try his hand at becoming an artist, Béraud became a student of Léon Bonnat, an influential artist of the period, and exhibited his paintings at the Salon for the first time in 1872. However it was not until 1876 that his work aroused real attention, with his On the Way Back from the Funeral considerably increasing his fame. Béraud painted many scenes of Parisian daily life during the Belle Époque in a style that stands somewhere between the academic art of the Salon and that of Impressionists. He exhibited with the Society of French Watercolourists at the 1889 World's Fair in Paris. He received the Légion d'honneur in 1894.

Very active in the art field, Béraud also worked on numerous exhibition committees and participated, in 1890 in the creation of the National Society of Fine Arts in the company of Rodin, Meissonier and Puvis de Chavannes.

Béraud died at his Parisian home on October 4, 1935. He is buried in Montparnasse cemetery, beside his mother. The following year, the Carnavalet museum paid tribute to the most Parisian of the painters of the Edwardian era.

Une parisienne

Oil on Canvas

55.5 x 33.0 cm

£ 20,000.00 GBP

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