Jean-Baptiste Greuze

Possibly M.C. Pillet, Paris (see Exhibited);
Léon Decloux, his sale, February 1898, lot 75,
acquired at the sale by Georges Dormeuil (L.1146a),
thence by descent to the present owners

Possibly Paris, Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Dessins des Maîtres Anciens, 1879, no. 572 ("Portrait de M. Legrand, ancien marchand de tableaux, vu à mi corps, presque de face, vers la droite. Redingote boutonnée, avec grande pèlerme; haute cravate blanche; cheveux longs et bouclés.  Aux deux crayons, lavé d'encre de Chine. H 0.365, L. 0.290.  Appartenait à M.C. Pillet)

Laid down on early 19th-century mount. One small repaired hole, lower left. Some very light foxing and stains throughout, and some light surface scratches in paper, top right, but overall condition very good and fresh. Sold in a fine antique carved and gilded frame.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Unseen since it was sold to Georges Dormeuil in 1898, and entirely unrecorded in the literature, this superb late portrait drawing by Greuze is a masterpiece of characterisation and technical skill.  It is also exceptional in the artist’s work in being very clearly conceived as a portrait, but executed in media that Greuze usually reserved for figure studies and anonymous character heads.  Indeed, extremely few drawn portraits by Greuze are known at all, the vast majority of his works in this genre being oil paintings or, more rarely, pastels.

Although the combination of red and black chalk that we see here does grow out of the trois crayons tradition of Watteau and Boucher (see lots 53 and 55 below), this is trois crayons in a very different incarnation.  Here the chalks are applied much more loosely and softly, creating a misty, mysterious image that invites us to contemplate not only the sitter’s handsome, young face, but also his character.  There is also extensive use of stumping to give areas of continuous, subtly modulated tone, a technique that Greuze used in his chalk drawings perhaps more often, and more effectively, than any other artist of his time.  As early as the 1750s, we see stumping playing a significant part in the artist’s creation of tonal effects, for example in a 1756 study of a standing old woman¹, and this combination of techniques occurs regularly in figure studies for paintings, executed throughout his career, or drawings made to record important painted figures, such as the splendid Bust of an Old Man, in the Woodner Collection at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.²  Rarely, though, did Greuze use much stumping in his numerous drawings of character heads, most of which are executed in red chalk alone, and even rarer is this example of a portrait drawing made in this way; only in the 1766 Profile Portrait of Denis Diderot, in the Pierpont Morgan Library, do we see a similar use of stumping, although in that case in tandem with black and white chalk, without any red.³ 

On the basis of the sitter’s costume and hairstyle, the drawing should be dated to the early or mid-1790s:  compare, for example, David’s famous painted self-portrait of 1790/91, in the Uffizi⁴, or a similar work by Ducreux⁵, dating from some two years later, and also the series of portrait drawings that David made of his fellow Montagnards, when they were imprisoned together in June-July of 1795.⁶

Supremely confident in every aspect of its execution, and delightfully capturing the equally supreme self-confidence of his dashing young sitter, this previously unknown drawing by Greuze, made when the artist was already around seventy years old, is the ultimate justification of Diderot’s observation, made some thirty years earlier when reviewing the Salon of 1763:  “…cet homme dessine comme un ange.”⁷    

1.  New York, Joseph McCrindle collection; E. Munhall, Greuze the Draftsman, exhib. cat., New York, The Frick Collection, and Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002, no. 6
2.  M. Morgan Grasselli, Renaissance to Revolution, French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, 1500-1800, exhib. cat., Washington, National Gallery of Art, 2009-10, no. 73
3.  Munhall, op. cit., no. 55
4.  1789: French Art During the Revolution, exhib. cat., New York, Colnaghi, 1989, p. 120, fig. 1
5.  Idem., no. 18
6.  P. Rosenberg and L.-A. Prat, Jacques-Louis David 1748-1825, Catalogue raisonné des dessins, 2 vols., Milan 2002, vol. I, nos. 147-155
7.  D. Diderot, Salons (1759-81), ed. J. Adhémar and J. Seznec, 4 vols., Oxford 1957-67, rev. ed. 1983, vol. I, p. 236