Original Street Scene with Figures, Oil on Canvas, Signed and Dated 1975

A narrow street runs back between tall buildings that lean toward each other as they rise. The facades on the left are laid in mauve and grey, those on the right in honey and warm brown, and both are cut through with black strokes that stand for shutters, gutters and window bars rather than describing them.

Figures are marks rather than drawings. A group crosses the middle distance in dark strokes. Lower down, one figure in bright lime green stands at the left kerb and another in orange moves along the right, and these two notes carry most of the colour in the picture. At the top the buildings open onto a pale sky worked in green grey and cream. The handling is fast throughout, brush and knife together, with the canvas weave showing where the paint was dragged thin.

About the Artist

Georges Berger was born in Normandy in 1908. He settled in Montmartre, where he became a friend of the painter Gen Paul, and the encounter placed him within the circle of expressionist painters who worked on the hill in the decades after the war. He kept to a small group of recurring subjects for the rest of his life, the streets of Paris, the quays of the Seine and the harbour at Honfleur, painted quickly and thickly with a loaded brush. He worked in oil and in pastel, and his canvases are usually signed G. Berger at one of the lower corners. He died in 1976, the year after this street scene was painted, which places it among his last works.

The canvas is signed at the lower left and sold unframed, ready for the moulding of your choice.