Louise Cattel Nursing (1894)

Alfred Roll: Louise Cattel Nursing

Exodus (1893)

Alfred Roll: Exodus

Portrait of Jane Hading (1890)

Alfred Roll: Portrait of Jane Hading

Jane Hading (25 November 1859 – 28 February 1941) was a French actress. Her real name was Jeanne-Alfrédine Tréfouret.

She was born in Marseille, where her father was an actor at the Gymnase. She has said that her first appearance on the stage came when she was three years old.

She was trained at the local Conservatoire and was engaged in 1873 for the theatre at Algiers, and afterwards for the Khedivial theatre at Cairo, where she played, in turn, coquette, soubrette and ingenue parts. Expectations had been raised by her voice, and when she returned to Marseille she sang in operetta, besides acting in Ruy Blas.

She first appeared in Paris in 1879 in La chaste Suzanne at the Palais Royal, and she was again heard in operetta at the Renaissance. She sang in La petite mariée and La belle Lurette. In 1883 she had a great success at the Gymnase in Le maître de forges. In 1884 she married Victor Koning (1842-1894), the manager of that theatre, but divorced him in 1887.

In 1888 and 1894, she toured America with Benoît Constant Coquelin. She helped to give success to Henri Lavedan's Le Prince d'Aurec at the Vaudeville in 1892, and afterwards joined the Comédie Française. Her reputation as one of the leading actresses of the day was established not only in France but in America and England. She also toured South America. Victorien Sardou chose her for the title role of his Marcelle in 1896. [Wikipedia]

Portrait of Monsieur Alphand (1888)

Alfred Roll: Portrait of Monsieur Alphand

Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand (1817-1891) was a French engineer of the Corps of Bridges and Roads. Under Napoléon III, Alphand participated in the renovation of Paris directed by Baron Haussmann between 1852 and 1870, in the company of another engineer Eugène Belgrand and the landscape architect Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps. After the retirement of Baron Haussmann, his successor, Léon Say, entrusted to Alphand the position of Director of Public Works of Paris. Under this title, Alphand continued Haussmann's works. [Wikipedia]

The Farm Girl (1887)

Alfred Roll: Manda Lamétrie, the Farm Girl

The most successful of the various paintings that Alfred Roll sent to the Salon in the 1880s were imposing figures of women going about their daily work. By including the names of the models in the titles of his paintings, he gave these scenes from everyday life the status of history paintings.

In 1888, the heroine of his offering for the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français was Amanda (Manda) Lamétrie. Born in 1867, and so scarcely twenty when Roll painted her portrait, Manda was a peasant woman from Sainte-Marguerite-sur-Mer, on the Normandy coast, near the artist's summer home, Castel d'Ailly. The young woman ran a farm where she raised a horse and three cows. Roll has put one of the cows, after milking, in the green orchard bordered by a hedge that forms the background of this painting. A neat summary of his model's occupation and surroundings.

Manda Lamétrie forms a monumental figure in the centre of the painting attracting the eye with her light-coloured clothing, particularly the large, pale yellow rectangle of her apron. Her determined expression is no less striking.

Regarded as the most important painting in the exhibition of 1888, this portrait was reproduced in large numbers, which did not stop Manda Lamétrie from going on with her quiet life as a Norman peasant, supplementing her income with shrimp fishing on the coast and keeping an eye on holiday houses, including Castel d'Ailly. [Musée d'Orsay]

Retour du Bal (1886)

Alfred Roll: Retour du Bal

In the nineteenth century, the ball is a significant form of recreation for all layers of society. In autumn and winter, the social season is punctuated by a number of private balls, reserved for high society, whose most important function is the preparation of matrimonial alliances. The decline of public balls from the Second Empire coincides with the rise of taverns along the Seine and Marne. While the old dance halls established at the gates of Paris disappear, the villages as Charenton, or Chatou (with the famous Maison Fournaise immortalized by Renoir) invite a Parisian clientele to their dances to taste joys of a more or less fictitious nature .

A student of Gérôme and Bonnat, Alfred Roll is by no means an academic painter or conventional; like the Impressionists, he is greatly attracted to scenes of modern life. Back From the Ball can legitimately be compared to Renoir’s Dance in the City and Dance in the Country - among Renoir’s most famous paintings. Renoir and Roll seem to look at the theme of the ball as a metaphor of the new pace to the French imposed by the modernization of the country after 1850. While the development of the railway makes possible the discovery of speed, the ball appears as the metaphor of a constantly changing society, where everyone is condemned to turn in the circle assigned to it. When this movement stops, as in this painting by Roll, it seems to lead only to boredom and emptiness - in this case the gray view mirror which reflects the face she undresses. [L’Histoire par L’image]