The Suicide

The Suicide, painted in the late 19th or early 20th century, is one of Forain most disturbing and most powerful works. The painting depicts the aftermath of a suicide, a figure lying on the floor while others - family, police, or medical personnel - look on. The subject, which few painters before Forain had dared to address directly, embodies his commitment to depicting the darkest corners of modern urban life. Forain was the most socially engaged of the artists associated with Impressionism. His work in the 1880s and 1890s - illustrations for Le Figaro and other publications, and paintings of the courts, hospitals, and brothels of Paris - constituted the most sustained visual investigation of the social costs of modernity undertaken by any artist of his generation. The Suicide belongs to this investigative project. The painting most striking feature is its restraint. Forain avoids the theatrical gestures that a Salon painter would have brought to this subject, rendering the scene with a brevity and coolness that makes it more disturbing than any melodramatic treatment could be. The rapid brushwork, the restricted palette, and the absence of moral commentary create an image of urban despair that anticipates the social realism of the 20th century.

Forain suicide paintings confronted the social costs of modern urban life with a directness that few of his contemporaries matched and influenced the tradition of social realism in French art. His willingness to address subjects that polite society preferred to ignore established a precedent for the socially committed painting of the 20th century.

The Suicide captures Forain most uncompromising quality: the refusal to look away from the suffering that modern urban life produces. His painting, cool and brief, is not a judgment but a record - a document of the human cost of a society that Forain spent his career investigating.