Georges Stein: Painter of Paris at Night

Night on one of the grands boulevards around 1905: a Morris column lit from within, café awnings and shopfronts glowing, a gas lamp on its island throwing a long reflection down the wet roadway. A flower-seller pushes her cart, a woman in a red jacket hurries across, an omnibus drawn by white horses comes down the middle of the street and an early motor car threads through the cabs. Georges Stein (1864–1917) painted this Paris for twenty-five years, and this signed gouache is now in our gallery at a fixed price.

Who Georges Stein was

Séverin Louis Stein, who signed his work Georges Stein, was born in Paris on 12 February 1864, the son of a bookbinder of Luxembourg origin. He trained under Jules Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger, and from the 1890s he gave himself to a single subject: the city of his birth at the hour when the lamps come on. The grands boulevards, the Opéra, the Champs-Élysées, the Place de la Concorde and the Bois de Boulogne, filled with cabs, omnibuses, flower-sellers and elegant women, are his whole repertoire, with excursions to London, Vichy and the Swiss cities.

He showed eight paintings at the Salon des Indépendants of 1906, exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français from 1912 to 1914 and painted four large canvases for the casino of Vichy in 1910. He also illustrated books, among them Léo Claretie’s Les Grands boulevards of 1897. He died in Geneva in December 1917. Dealers’ catalogues and auction databases still often print his dates as 1870–1955; the Paris birth register and the Geneva death notice cited by the Bibliothèque nationale de France give 1864–1917, and we follow them on his artist page.

Why the night scenes are the ones to buy

Stein belongs with Jean Béraud, Luigi Loir and Eugène Galien-Laloue among the painters who fixed the image of Belle Époque Paris, and like Galien-Laloue he was at his best in gouache. The medium suits the subject: a sheet of grey and black washes for the wet street and the winter sky, then opaque white and yellow gouache for the lamps, the lit windows and the posters on the column, so that the light sits on top of the dark instead of being mixed into it. Daylight views of the same boulevards exist in quantity; the evening and night scenes, with their reflections, are the part of his work collectors ask for first. The same streets, painted half a century later, are the subject of our article on Antoine Blanchard.

What Georges Stein’s paintings sell for

His oils on canvas reach five figures in the main London and New York rooms: Christie’s London sold Carrousel du Louvre, Paris, an oil of 38.5 × 55 cm, for 10,000 GBP against an estimate of 8,000–12,000 GBP on 17 May 2016, and Sotheby’s New York estimated The Flower Market, an oil of 43 × 55 cm, at 5,000–7,000 USD in 2012. Gouaches and watercolours, the larger part of his output, trade well below that in the Paris, London and American sale rooms, with the night views at the top of the range. For a signed, inscribed night boulevard of this size and quality, 2,200 € at a fixed price, without any buyer’s premium, is below what the same sheet would cost with the premium added at auction.

How to read this sheet

It is signed Georges Stein and inscribed Paris at the lower right, as his finished gouaches usually are. The reverse of the frame carries two auction labels, Cornette de Saint-Cyr and Digard, both Paris houses, which record the picture’s passage through the Paris rooms before it reached a Spanish collection. It is presented under glass in a carved and gilt frame with a linen mount; the photographs on the page show the sheet, the frame, the signature and the labels.

At Aurora & Athena

Winter Evening on the Grands Boulevards, Paris, c. 1905, gouache and watercolour on paper, 30 × 40 cm, framed under glass (52 × 62 cm), signed and inscribed at the lower right, is in our gallery at 2,200 €. The price is final, with no buyer’s premium; Buy now reserves the work for 48 hours while you pay by bank transfer or card, and the page shows the shipping estimate for your address. It can be seen in Barcelona by appointment and is covered by our five-year guarantee of authorship. More Paris pictures at this level in our guide to Paris paintings under 5,000 €. Details and photographs on the work’s page.