Germain Eugène Bonneton

Germain Eugène Bonneton (1854–1919) was a French painter who specialised in documenting the Bièvre river and the working-class neighbourhoods of the Left Bank of Paris in the decade before those areas were transformed by Haussmann's successors. Born in Paris, he trained at the École des Beaux-Arts. The ten paintings in this batch—all dated 1900–1901—form part of his systematic visual record of the Bièvre, the small river that ran through the tanners' and dyers' districts of the 13th arrondissement before being covered over in the early twentieth century: La Bièvre rue de Valence, La Bièvre rue Vulpian, Vue de la Bièvre ruelle des Gobelins, Bras gauche de la Bièvre boulevard Arago, La Bièvre rue des Cordelières. He also painted the adjacent streets—La rue du Moulin-des-Prés, La rue Rataud, La rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, La Butte aux Cailles—and the Seine at port Saint-Nicolas. These are documentary paintings of a disappearing working-class Paris, made with the same archival impulse that drove Lansyer's Latin Quarter series.

Bonneton's style is a modest, functional naturalism suited to architectural documentation: clear representation of specific streetscapes, controlled atmospheric colour, and a straightforward compositional approach. His Bièvre paintings have a melancholy quality deriving from the specific character of the dark, polluted river and the worn masonry of the tannery district.

Bonneton's Bièvre paintings are historically significant as among the most systematic visual records of the river and its working-class environs before it was covered over. The Bièvre no longer exists as a visible feature of Paris, making his paintings invaluable documents of a lost urban environment.