(Barcelona 1875–1968 Venezuela)
Elegant Ladies at a Roller Rink, oil on canvas, 39.5 x 64.5 cm, framed

Roller-skating first made an appearance in London in the middle of the 19th century and quickly became a fashion phenomenon. It is considered to have been sparked by two ballets that were first performed in Paris in 1849. In the Grand Opéra “Le Prophète” by Giacomo Meyerbeer and in the comic ballet “Les Plaisirs de l’Hiver” by Paul Taglioni, the act of skating was represented by the invention of roller skates. A few years later, in 1857, the first “skating rinks” opened in London, one on the Strand and one in Floral Hall in Covent Garden. Five years after that, the American James Léonard Plimpton launched a model with four wheels that quickly gained in popularity.
José Simont Guillèn, known as José Simont, was born in Barcelona in 1875. His father worked as a saddle maker for the army, which meant that the family moved around a lot and that Simont spent his childhood in various cities across Spain. His interest in drawing was encouraged from an early age, and he studied at the École des Beaux Arts de Lonja as a teenager. In the winter of 1898, he moved to Paris and worked as an independent artist from then on. There was a lively group of Catalan artists in fin-de-siècle Paris, which he quickly joined. Nevertheless, Simont struggled to make enough to survive for the first few months and he was only able to make a living from small orders for magazine illustrations. These first, perhaps rather pragmatically motivated works, led to a very successful career in the years thereafter. His breakthrough came when the two most important weekly magazines, “Le Monde Illustré” and “L’Illustration”, became aware of him, with Simont signing an exclusivity agreement with the latter in 1902. In the years around 1910, in particular, his work reflects the life and interests of the glitterati, depicting opera and theatre performances, equestrian sports, Sunday excursions to the Bois de Boulogne and new types of sports such as tennis or roller-skating. This enables this lot to be dated to around 1910. “Nos Élégantes au skating” was probably created on behalf of the furrier
Revillon Frères, who revolutionised fur fashion, both in terms of techniques and styles, around 1900: alongside traditional fur linings and smaller fur items like muffs or collars, they were the first to construct whole coats with the fur on the outside. These new, ankle-length fur coats took Parisian fashion by storm and were even displayed at the Exposition Universelle.
This lot was certainly commissioned by the company and served as a model for an advertisement. Simont’s design reveals the striking casualness with which the elegant ladies at the roller-skating rink show off different styles and types of fur in seemingly random order, with each being explained in more detail in the text underneath the illustration.