Jules, Antoine Voirin
Lively street scene in Paris – Circa 1880
Oil on canvas
Signed lower right
Dimensions: 28.5 x 46.5cm
With frame: 43 x 61 cm
Old exhibition number on the back.
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Jules Voirin gives us here a lively street scene of the capital.
In front of the luxurious windows of a Parisian boulevard, passes a carriage transporting two elegant women. Many other characters: walkers, families, children as well as a horseman from the Republican Guard enliven the painting. we can also find one of the symbols of Paris, a Morris column which has inspired many artists such as the writer Marcel Proust, the photographer Brassaï or the painter Jean Béraud.
Our work bears witness to the painter’s love for urban scenes of daily life, treated with a sense of anecdote and precision of detail.
Léon and Jules Voirin, are two twin brothers, painters, in Nancy, under the July Monarchy, in a family of merchants. After having followed the courses of the secondary school of medicine, they decide to devote themselves definitively to painting, art which they practice since the age of 15. They thus spent two years with their master Eugène Guérard in Paris before returning definitively to the Lorraine capital. Their official career began at the Salon de Nancy in 1866. From 1874, they participate in the Salons des Beaux-Arts in Paris where they exhibited their paintings frequently. They were talented chroniclers of daily life in Nancy in the second half of the 19th century and brought the genre scene back into fashion, a pictorial genre that had disappeared in the provinces since the end of the 18th century. They devoted their entire career to sketching and representing civilian or military scenes of everyday life: street scenes, fairs, races, military halts, rehearsals or parades…Friends of Charles de Meixmoron and the family Wiener, they admire and collect the works of the Impressionists, whom they frequent. family home on rue des Michottes to devote themselves to their work, surrounded by their collections. They are buried in the Préville cemetery and a street in Nancyis named after them. .
Many works are in private collections as well as in the Museum of Fine Arts in Nancy.
Bibliography :
• Emmanuel Bénézit, Dictionary of painters, sculptors, designers and engravers,
• Olivier Lalonde (pref. François Pupil), “The Voirin brothers, scenes of modern life in Nancy at the end of the 19th century”, Ars-sur-Moselle, S. Domini, 2009,
• Gérald Schurr & Pierre Cabanne “Dictionary of the little masters of painting 1820-1920”, Editions de l’amateur.
Museums :
• Nancy Museum of Fine Arts:
– The cab being loaded.
– The vegetable garden.
– Wild boar at the farm in the woods
• Lorraine Museum:
-The Fair in Nancy place of the Academy
-The Auction House (1882)
•Private collections:
– The Races (1888),
– The Return from a walk (1886)
– The Arrival of the hunters on foot (1882)
– Infantry post on Place Stanislas (1880)
– The Passage of the 12th Dragon in Nancy (1884)
– The Calèche (1887),
