Soir de fête 

Delphin Enjolras probably painted this pastel drawing, Soir de Fête, sometime around the turn of the century. It shows three women enjoying themselves in a garden at night. What can we say about the social context of the work? It’s a depiction of fashionable leisure: lantern light, flowy dresses, a guitar, and a colonnaded terrace beyond. These are the trappings of the upper class at the time, which was the only class that had the economic freedom to enjoy themselves in this way. We can see that Enjolras did many paintings of women in domestic settings. This tells us something about what kind of art was popular at the time. The art market often dictated which subjects would sell. To understand this drawing better, we might look at magazines and advertisements from the time, to see how women were being represented in the public sphere. Or we might look at the exhibition histories of popular artists like Enjolras. That way, we can understand how the image relates to wider social and institutional contexts.