Rue de la Paix

Marie-Louis-Pierre Vidal

n.d. · Watercolor · Drawings and Prints

Henri Béraldi, the great collector and scholar of eighteenth-century French prints and drawings, commissioned his friend Marie-Louis Pierre Vidal to create this series of seventy watercolors, which Vidal executed between 1900 and 1913. Beraldi and Vidal's work depicts a detailed pictorial record of the daily life in Belle Époque Paris. Inspired by the celebrated Monument du Costume of the late eighteenth century, which showcased illustrations by Sigmond Freudeberg and Moreau le Jeune, Béraldi planned to publish Vidal's images in an édition de luxe. The outbreak of World War I, in 1914, put a halt to the project and the drawings were organized in three portfolios, instead, which is how they remain up to this day.

Artist

Marie-Louis-Pierre Vidal

Date

n.d.

Medium

Watercolor

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1950