Raffaelli is dead

The painter Jean-François Raffaelli has just died in Paris at the age of 74. He first made himself known through works of a somewhat dry, but nevertheless tasty, realism, whose subjects were borrowed from the lives of the common people of the Parisian suburbs. Then he devoted himself to the landscape which he generally animated with figures. The sites of the South had in him a very personal interpreter. However, this second period of his production did not bring him the same success as the first. One of his most famous paintings is the one in which he depicted Clemenceau at a public meeting platform. He was also an engraver and lithographer, and perhaps his engraved work will reach posterity more surely than his paintings, from which fans have for some time tended to move away. He was, all in all, a very fine artist, but one who will remain second rate.