File:Modiste sur le Pont des Arts.jpg

English: Modiste sur le (Milliner on the) Pont des Arts belongs to the series of paintings Béraud made of the bustling Pont des Arts in wintry or windy weather, with the dome of the Institut de France visible beyond. Of the four other related versions of the subject (see Patrick Offenstadt, Jean Béraud. The Belle Epoque: A Dream of Times Gone By, Cologne, 1999, nos. 166, 167, 168, 168bis), one is in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, and another in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Here, Béraud captures the spirit of the moment, as a gust of wind sweeps over the bridge, the men leaning forward or back into the wind and clutching their hats. Out of the corner of his eye a young artist - to judge by his canvas and paint box - steals a glimpse of a pretty young milliner laden with hat boxes, who in turn sends a coquettish glance towards the viewer. In another work in the series, the girl herself is cast as the artist, with a top-hatted man looking back at her over his shoulder. It is intriguing to speculate about the possible identity of the bearded man in the tan coat. Could he be a self-referential figure, Béraud himself catching sight of his next subject? Or could he be the painter Elixir from Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, known to have been a composite of Blanche, Helleu, Gervex, Vuillard, Whistler, and Jean Béraud?

Béraud’s paintings are today synonymous with the Paris Belle Époque, so much so that at the turn of the century a scene of Parisian life came to be known as a ‘Béraud’. He adored the city, in all weathers, at any time of day or night, indoors or out, and above all loved its people, whether the aristocracy and upper middle classes, the bourgeoisie, or the working people. A pupil of Léon Bonnat, Béraud’s rigorous draughtsmanship owes something to this academic training, but his choice of subjects was poles apart from those of the Neoclassicists Bouguereau, Clairin and Gleyre. Doubtless Béraud’s elegant realism owed something to the new art of photography pioneered by Niépce, Daguerre, and Fox Talbot. But, hungry for verisimilitude, he was in a sense a roving camera himself, making sketches on the spot, on foot or from hansom cabs.