Ragpickers of Clichy

Émile Bernard's Ragpickers of Clichy (1887) is one of his early social subject paintings — depicting the chiffonniers who sifted through Paris's waste for rags, paper, and recyclable materials. The ragpicker was a significant presence in nineteenth-century Paris art, from Baudelaire's poetry to Manet's paintings; for Bernard at 19, the subject connected to the social awareness that coexisted with his formal experimentation. Clichy — the working-class suburb northwest of Paris where Van Gogh also painted ragpickers — was associated with urban poverty and the informal economy of the poor.

Bernard renders the Clichy ragpickers with a technique still developing toward his mature Synthetism — the forms are somewhat more naturalistic than his 1888 Breton subjects but already showing simplification and formal organization beyond pure Naturalism. His palette for this urban poverty subject is appropriately muted — the grey-browns of urban waste, the dull clothing of the poor, the specific light of a working-class suburb. The figures are rendered with social sympathy rather than picturesque distance.