Oil on canvas

Signed lower right

Dimensions: 28.5 x 46.5cm

With frame: 43 x 61 cm

Old exhibition number on the back.

Jules Voirin gives us here a lively street scene in the capital.

In front of the luxurious windows of a Parisian boulevard, passes a cab transporting two elegant women. Many other characters: onlookers, families, children as well as a horseman from the Republican Guard animate the painting. There is also 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 testifies 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 attending the secondary school of medicine, they decided to devote themselves definitively to painting, an art they had been practicing since the age of fifteen. 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 participated in the Salons des Beaux-Arts in Paris where they made frequent submissions. 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 devote their entire career to sketching and representing scenes of daily life, civilian or military: street scenes, fairs, races, military halts, rehearsals or parades... Friends of Charles de Meixmoron and the Wiener family, they admire and collect the works of the Impressionists, whom they frequent. In 1886, they collaborate with the Majorelle house in the decoration of several screens intended for illustrious orders, in particular for the King of Holland. of rue des Michottes to devote themselves to their work, surrounded by their collections. They are buried in the Préville cemetery and a street in Nancy bears their name.

Many works are in private collections as well as in the Nancy Museum of Fine Arts.