Description & Technical information

The present sheet, which is likely to depict Bastille Day in Paris, is unusual in Steinlen’s oeuvre in being a large-scale, nocturnal urban view. It may be associated with such genre works by the artist as a painting of The Bastille Day Dance of 1889, in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris at the Petit Palais in Paris.

The first known owner of this large gouache was the pioneering Glasgow art dealer and collector Alexander (Alex) Reid (1854-1928). The present sheet was lent by his grandson, Graham H. Reid, to the 1967 Scottish Arts Council exhibition devoted to Alex Reid. 


Gouache and watercolour on paper laid down on a thin board.
Signed Steinlen in white gouache at the lower left. 

Medium: Gouache and watercolour on paper
Dimensions: 48.4 x 34.9 cm (19 x 13³/₄ inches)
Provenance: Alexander Reid, Glasgow
By descent to his second wife, Mary E. Patrick
Her posthumous sale, Glasgow, Morrison, McChlery & Co., 19 May 1967, lot 172 (as A Paris Evening Street Scene, bt. Reid for £60)
Graham Hume Reid, Godalming, Surrey, in 1967.
Literature: Frances Fowle, Alexander Reid in Context: Collecting and Dealing in Scotland in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 1993, p.516.
Exhibitions: Edinburgh, The Scottish Arts Council, A Man of Influence: Alex Reid (1854-1928), 1967, no.39 (as Evening Street Scene, Paris, lent by Graham H. Reid).
Categories: Paintings, Drawings & Prints