Footnotes

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Brame & Lorenceau. This work is included in the Louis Anquetin archives.

Provenance
Edouard Borderie Collection, Paris (acquired in 1946).
Bernard & Betty French Collection, Kidderminster (acquired from the above circa 1947).
Cyril Lavenstein Collection, Kidderminster (acquired from the above in 1956).
Private collection, UK (acquired from the above in 1977).
Thence by descent to the present owner.

Louis Anquetin rose to fame in the late 1880s among the post-Impressionist artists, and was instrumental in the birth of Cloisonnism. Élégantes, scène de rue, executed in 1888, is a prime example of the artist's work from this key period.

Anquetin studied at the Beaux-Arts de Paris in the studio of Fernand Cormon. Cormon was a pompier artist who painted large, academic subjects of historical inspiration which were welcomed by the Third Republic and deemed official art. Yet his atelier attracted many avant-garde painters who would radically separate themselves from academism and noble subjects (historical or allegorical), such as Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Émile Bernard. Remaining in this atelier for four years, Anquetin and his peers would inspire each other – the former's influence on van Gogh for example is particularly visible in works such as Avenue de Clichy, cinq heures du soir which preceded van Gogh's famous The Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum by a year.

Paul Gauguin would eventually also join these artists, and van Gogh named the group 'les artistes du petit boulevard'. Translating to 'the artists of the small boulevard', the name referred to the areas they worked around Montmartre, near the Boulevard de Clichy and the Boulevard de Rochechouart. The title was also to distinguish themselves from other well-established artists such as Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro, who were termed 'les artistes du grand boulevard'. These artists worked in more elegant neighbourhoods and exhibited in major galleries, whereas Anquetin, van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and Bernard would still exhibit in small cafés and restaurants.

At the 1888 Salon des Indépendants, the critic Édouard Dujardin announced in the Revue Indépendante that Louis Anquetin had created a new genre, which he termed 'Cloisonnism'. This referred to a new post-Impressionist style of painting with bold and dark contours around flat areas of colours and simplified forms. It is said that the idea came to Anquetin when he was at his parents' house as he looked up outside through a glass door with coloured tiles. Also inspired by the Japanese prints collected by his friend Vincent van Gogh, Anquetin became transfixed by the different shades and colours that this stained glass gave the outside world. Dujardin's article immediately propelled Anquetin to fame.

Élégantes, scène de rue was executed during that pivotal year of 1888. In accordance with the technique of Cloisonnism, the main figure in the present work, dressed in green, is delineated by a thick black line that creates a compartmentalisation of the forms whilst following the folds of her garment. Seen from behind, she crosses a boulevard whilst gazing to her right, beyond the composition. A second woman, holding an parasol, looks directly at her, whilst a gentleman seated in a carriage beyond contemplates them both. Anquetin builds the composition through a triangle of looks, which follows the path of each protagonist's gaze as it bounces from one figure to the other. In this enigmatic trio where no interest is reciprocal, the painter relegates the male gaze to the background of the composition and foregrounds instead the female gaze.

The contrast between the elegantly depicted central figure and the more caricature-like appearance of the man in the carriage and the woman in purple – whose loud make-up hints she is a prostitute looking for a client - is characteristic of Anquetin's work and seen in works such as Élégante à l'Élysée Montmartre, 1888, in the Art Institute of Chicago. The more carefully constructed figure draws our attention away from the darker elements at play, nonetheless placing Anquetin as an observer of urban life in the late 1880s. Anquetin worked on a thematically linked group of works exploring the morals and behaviours of lesbian relationships, such as the one at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which is very similar to the present work. As Richard Thomson explains, 'at the turn of the decade, Anquetin treated this specific theme on a number of occasions, representing the woman in her carriage on the lookout, the eye contact from carriage to pavement, and the pedestrian woman using her tongue to signal a passing vehicle' (R. Thomson, The Troubled Republic: Visual Culture and Social Debate in France, 1889-1900, London, 2004, p. 38). These images were discreet and relied on codes that were mostly insider knowledge, which made them an even more appealing subject for artists like Anquetin or Toulouse-Lautrec who were never reluctant to show controversial subjects at the turn of the century and explore the hidden side of Parisian society.

A trip to Belgium and Holland with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Jos Albert in 1894 however, prompted a shift in Anquetin's work towards a more classical style, heavily inspired by Old Masters such as Rubens and Rembrandt. He became a teacher and taught his pupils the 'retour au métier' ('return to the craft'), rather than encouraging them to strive for modernity and experimentation. The present work thus marks a poignant end to his most creative and innovative period.