Wanderer in the rain, pastel on paper by Jean-François Raffaelli.
Trained for a few months in Jean-Léon Gérôme's studio at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, he began his career depicting scenes of daily life in his environment: the Zone. This space outside the walls of Paris provided the artist with many of his subjects, where the disinherited and the wretched abound. He treated these subjects with a certain elevation, a meticulous observation devoid of malice, and his insistence on submitting these works to the Salons divided critics and artists alike.
The subject of the vagabond was a leitmotif in his work; observing them from his pavilion in Asnières, one of them, Joseph Briou and his dog, was represented many times by Raffaelli.
Although Raffaelli enjoyed success during his lifetime, portraying the great minds of his time, such as Goncourt and Huysmans, he always retained his sensitivity to the downtrodden and the "petit-peuple".
