The Joys Of Skating, Oil On Canvas, Signed, Circa 1880

The Joys of Skating – A Comic Winter Scene, 19th-Century
French School
Oil on canvas
Illegible signature lower right
Period: circa 1850–1870

In a winter setting with bare trees and a misty atmosphere, a makeshift skating rink becomes the scene of joyful chaos: well-dressed figures soar, fall, mingle, or observe, in a scene full of movement and comedy. In the foreground, an elegantly dressed couple has collapsed full length—the young woman in a turquoise dress and the man at her side display expressions that mix surprise and ridicule. Nearby, another man slides clumsily, clutching a green parasol. An amused-looking woman, wrapped in an ermine-trimmed pelisse, seems to cross the stage with dignity, surrounded by children.
The narrative treatment is lively, the poses theatrical, and the brushwork supple. The whole evokes the pleasures of a bourgeois winter in an atmosphere that is both graceful and burlesque.
Although the signature at the bottom right is difficult to decipher, the work clearly falls within the register of French painters such as Xavier Narcy, active in the second half of the 19th century. The latter is known for his lively genre scenes, where the anecdote comes to life through droll and refined compositions. The touch of Narcy (or of a similar painter) can be recognized here in the attention to comic expressions, the details of bourgeois fashion (muffs, scarves, parasols), the care given to the scenes full of movement, the contrast between the seriousness of society and the absurdity of the situation.
In the 19th century, genre scenes became democratized in bourgeois interiors, notably in the form of small narrative paintings, where we often find the themes of entertainment, social awkwardness, and simple pleasures turned into derision. Here, the skating scene joins the codes of boulevard theatre or illustrated caricature, in the tradition of the works of Gavarni or Boilly, but with a more careful pictorial style.