Promenade, about 1930

oil on canvas

36 ½ x 29 ¼ in.

James E. Roberts Fund

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Guy Pène du Bois was born in 1884 in Brooklyn, New York, into a French family from New Orleans. His father, a noted critic, brought up his son in a cultured, literary environment. Pène du Bois studied with William Merritt Chase at the New York School of Art and later with Robert Henri. He is known for his paintings of high society that incorporate figures with simplified rounded features reminiscent of caricatures. He also worked as a critic for several New York newspapers and became editor of Arts and Decoration. Du Bois first visited Paris in 1905 and returned again in 1924. Fashionable people in Paris cafés became his favorite subject. He began to explore the interactions between men and women and studied them in a variety of public settings. He became known for his paintings of flappers, so popular in the 1920s, sometimes depicting them as threatening figures. His work can be humorous, satirical or emotionally charged. In 1940 he published his autobiography, Artists Say the Silliest Things.

Guy Pène du Bois’s daughter Yvonne said that after teaching his class at the Art Students League, he always walked back to his studio on 10^th Street. He strolled along 5^th Avenue, swinging his Malacca cane and observing the people walking by him in the opposite direction. His strong figural group Promenade is one of several paintings that resulted from these walks. The surface is smoothly painted with wide strokes of the brush, in the tradition of the artist’s teacher Robert Henri. In this satiric painting, two women, wearing stylish dresses and hats, are deep in conversation while they stroll along a boulevard. This painting hung in the artist’s Boston home at the time of his death.

References

Betsy Fahlman.  Guy Pène du Bois: Painter of Modern Life. New York: Quantuck Lane Press; illustrated edition, 2004. ISBN-13: 978-1593720056