M. Bessonneau d'Angers (sold: his sale, Galerie Charpentier, Paris, June 15, 1954, lot 3, illustrated)

L'Illustration, November 28, 1891, p. 427, illustrated
Patrick Offenstadt, Jean Béraud 1849-1935, The Belle Époque: A Dream of Times Gone By, catalogue raisonné, Cologne, 1999, p. 203, no. 237, illustrated

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This work has been recently restored. The panel on which it is painted is flat. The paint layer is stable, clean and retouched. The paint layer is un-abraded, but the darker reds in the dress of the figure and the darkest colors in the loge above and below the window have developed some cracking that has received fine and accurate retouches. The work is clearly very well preserved.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

By the end of the nineteenth century, half of a million Parisians visited the theater once per week, and with the addition of patrons commuting from the surrounding rural areas and tourists from elsewhere, that number swelled to one million ticket holders per month (Barbara Stern Shapiro, Pleasures of Paris, Daumier to Picasso, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, exh. cat.,  1991, p. 109). The theater dominated the cultural life of Paris, and entertainments varied from the fashionable elegance of Théâtre Français and the Paris Opéra, to private theaters and music halls, or experimental and avant-garde performances.

Theatres were open to all tiers of society, and as the wealth of the middle class increased, loges were no longer the exclusive preserve of the wealthy. Given the broad cross-section of soci𓆏ety on display, an evening at the opera naturally became a rich source of inspiration for artists.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir famously painted high society ladies occupying their loges in A Box at the Opera (1880, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown), and La Loge (1874, The Courtauld Gallery, London); Honoré Daumier satirized the general audience with caricatures of the people and their behavior; Mary Cassatt’s At the Opera (1879, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) demonstrates that patrons may be just as interested in each other as they are in the activity on stage, underscoring that the theater was a place to see and be seen. In Box at the Opéra (1880, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, fig. 1) Jean-Louis Forain positions himself and the viewer in the male-dominated orchestra seats, watching a patron cross a threshold of civility and address a lovely Parisienne across the partition. In the present work, Béraud has amplified this game of glances. As in Cassatt’s composition, the viewer looks out to the th🌱eater from within the l💛oge. With opera glasses in one hand and a closed fan in the other, the lady in a red gown, chapeau and long yellow gloves looks particularly self-assured. Oblivious to the older, mustached theater-goer behind her, she leans on the half wall that separates her from the orchestra pit and catches the eye of a man leaving with a group of top-hatted gentlemen (as well as a look from woman in the opposite box). In the box above, another man seems to tilt his head and stare, while his companion appears to glare in disapproval.

The sometimes rowdy, participatory orchestra seats of Parisian theaters in the nineteenth century were typically accessible to men only, while the boxes around the perimeter, or loges, could accommodate guests of either gender. As a traveler’s guidebook from the period suggests, “parties save money by taking a loge but the loges are small and uncomfortable … there is barely room for the chairs,” and continues to warn that “a good looking or well-dressed woman is on exhibition there for the men … who would scarcely notice her if were sitting among them” (William Walton, Paris from the earliest period to the present day, Philadelphia, 1899, vol. III, p. 320-2).