Une Soirée Au Pré Catelan
Une Soirée Au Pré Catelan (An Evening At Pré Catelan) c1909 by French Painter Henri Gervex (1852 – 1929); who studied under the artists Alexandre Cabanel, Pierre-Nicolas Brisset and Eugène Fromentin.
Enjoying a night out in the early 20th century at the famous Pré Catelan restaurant in Paris France.
Une Soirée Au Pré Catelan is a retouched digital art old masters reproduction of a public domain image.
Info Below From Wikipedia.org
He was the son of Joséphine Peltier and Félix Nicolas Gervex, a piano maker. When he was 15, a friend of the family helped him get admitted to the atelier of Pierre-Nicolas Brisset. Three years later, he served in the 152nd Battalion of the National Guard. In 1871 he was accepted into the École des Beaux-Arts in the studio of Alexandre Cabanel, where he studied for five years along with Jean-Louis Forain, Fernand Cormon, and Eugène Damas, a landscape painter. He also apprenticed himself to the Orientalist painter Eugène Fromentin.
His early work belonged almost exclusively to the mythological genre, which served as an excuse for the painting of the nude, but not always in the best of taste. His Rolla of 1878, based on a poem by Alfred de Musset, was rejected by the jury of the Salon de Paris for immorality, since it depicted a scene from the poem of a naked prostitute after having sex with her client.
Gervex was one of many lovers entertained by the famous courtesan Valtesse de La Bigne. Their relationship was long and deep, with Gervex including the golden haired beauty in his piece of art called The Civil Marriage of 1881; here Valtesse De la Bigne is dressed from head to toe in blue, her favourite colour as it symbolises royalty, standing beside a dark haired man with a moustache. Another painting of La Bigne inspired Émile Zola in the creation of his heroine for the novel Nana, and Gervex himself was the model for the character of an opportunistic painter who appears in Zola’s novel L’Œuvre (The Work [of Art], 1886).
Gervex afterwards devoted himself to representations of modern life and achieved signal success with his Dr Péan at the Salpétrière (“The Operation”), a modernized paraphrase, as it were, of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson
