Jeffay moved to Paris around 1919, participated in various ‘Salon des Independants’ exhibitions over the next two decades, and adopted the pseudonym ‘Paul Jeffay’ (also working under the names Paul Lebeau, and Solomon/Saül Yaffie/Yafie). In 1930, he founded his own studio in ‘Fontenay-aux-Roses’, where he remained (with the exception of the Second World War years, when he returned to Britain) until his death in 1957. Upon returning to his studio after the war, he found it had been looted by the German army of Occupation and the greater part of his work had been destroyed.

This painting depicts La Rue des Rosiers (which translates as the street of rose bushes), in the fourth arrondissement of Paris, at the heart of the Jewish quarter in the Marais, nicknamed 'the Pletzl' (Yiddish for 'little place'). A small Jewish community had been resident from the Middle Ages and expanded rapidly in the late 19th century as a result of pogroms in Eastern Europe, and at the start of the Second World War. When the Germans invaded France in May 1940, about 175,000 Jews resided or had found refuge in Paris. Thousands were arrested and sent to concentration camps, where many perished; others fled or went into hiding and later returned. After the liberation in August 1944, it is estimated that at least 50,000 Parisian Jews, most of them foreign-born, had been deported and murdered.

Dated 1949, Jeffay’s bustling street scene depicts a thriving, largely religiously observant Jewish community and shows no sign of the recent conflict. It was perhaps in part a nostalgic evocation of the Marais pre-war, as suggested by its inclusion in the exhibition 'Visages du Ghetto: Paintings, Drawings and Etchings of Jewish Europe before the War by Paul Jeffay', mounted by the Ben Uri in 1994.