Pierre Carrier-Belleuse
(French, 1851-1933)
La Piste du Bal, Quadrille Metra
Oil on Canvas
24 1/4 x 15 3/4 Inches
Signed lower right
Until the 1870s, Montmartre, the section of Paris best remembered as the home of the Impressionists, Cubists, and other members of the avant-garde, was a sleepy little village spotted with windmills. However, as the city expanded in the late-nineteenth century, Montmartre was incoporated into its limits and soon became the hub of Parisian nightlife. In 1881, the famed Moulin Rouge opened its doors, delighting its customers with operettas, can-can girls, and dances. The success of the Moulin Rouge inspired a number of music halls and cafés to spring up, including the Caran d’Ache, the Mirliton, and the infamous Folies-Bergère, and before long the pleasures available there attracted Parisians from all walks of life: workers, artists, the middle class, the demi-mondaine, and aristocrats mingled together in Montmartre’s cabarets and dance halls.
Eventually, the neighborhood’s reputation for debauchery and delight inspired painters and writers alike to take up residence there and immortalize its visitors and residents in pictures and words. Among these was Pierre Carrier-Belleuse, the son of the famed artist Albert Carrier-Belleuse. In his painting La Piste du Bal, Quadrille Metra, the artist sought to capture the excitement of a night at the dance hall. In the center of composition, the man with the red beard has just called the revelers to dance a quadrille to the music of Olivier Metra (1830-1889), whose compositions were wildly popular at the time. Two women have answered the call and begun to follow the rhythm of Metra’s music. Aristocrats and bourgeois alike relax in the background, flirting with each other and enjoying a drink as the quadrille begins. What Carrier-Belleuse presents us with in this charming painting is an accurate image of life in Paris during the Belle Époque and a reminder of the pleasures of an evening in Montmartre.
The Artist
The versatile painter Pierre Carrier-Belleuse grew successful at painting and drawing under the hand of his famous father, the preeminent 19th century sculptor Albert Ernest Carrier-Belleuse. Pierre also studied under Cabanel and Galland at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and debuted at the Paris Salon in 1875. He mastered pastels (a difficult medium only recently revived by the Impressionist school) rendering genre works, landscapes, historical subjects and portraiture. Other Parisian venues in which he exhibited included the Society of French Artists (1888) and the National Society of Fine Arts (1893-1911). He received an honorable mention for his work in 1887 and a silver medal at the Exposition Universelle in 1889.
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