L13033

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Lot 48
  • 48

Jean-Marc Nattier

Estimate
800,000 - 1,200,000 GBP
bidding is closed

Description

  • Jean-Marc Nattier
  • An allegory of Justice combatting Injustice
  • oil on canvas

Provenance

Commissioned by Jean-Philippe, Grand Prieur d’Orléans (1702-1748) for the Palais du Temple, Paris;
Bought back by the artist at the death of the above in 1748;
Jean-Marc Nattier, his sale, Paris, Joullain, 27 June 1763;
Probably Dellezenne Collection, Paris;
His (deceased) sale, Paris, Martin, 19 May 1818, lot 1 ( ‘Madame Adélaïde sous l’emblème de la Justice’, as one of the ‘Quatre Vertus Cardinales’);
Fleury-Hérard Collection, Paris;
His sale, Drouot, 29 February 1872, lot 1, for 7,900 francs (where said to be signed and dated 1737);
H. M. W. Oppenheim;
His sale, London, Christie’s, 13 June 1913, lot 48, £504 to C. Davis;
With Georges Wildenstein, Paris by 1925 (according to de Nolhac, see Literature below);
Acquired from the above by the family of the present owner circa 1930.

 

Exhibited

Paris, Salon, 1737;
Paris, Grand Palais, Les Artistes du Salon de 1737, 1930, no. 80;
Versailles, Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Jean-Marc Nattier, 26 October 1999 - 30 January 2000, no. 19.

Literature

Livret du Salon, Paris 1737, p. 15;
Mercure de France, April 1737, p. 762, and September 1737, p. 2024;
C. Palissot de Montenoy, Eloge de M. Nattier, Peintre ordinaire du Roi et professeur de son Académie..., Paris 1768, vol. I, pp.14-15;
Marie Catherine Pauline Tocqué (née Nattier), 'Abrégé de la vie de M. Nattier, peintre et professeur de l'Académie Royale de la peinture et de sculpture, par sa fille, Mlle. Nattier l'aînée, épouse de M. Tocqué', in Mémoirs inédits sur la vie et les oeuvres des membres de l'Académie Royale..., Paris 1854, vol. II, pp. 348-64.
P. Mantz, 'J.-M. Nattier', in La Gazette des Beaux-Arts, XII August 1894, p. 100;
P. de Nolhac, J.-M. Nattier peintre de la Cour de Louis XV, Paris 1905, pp. 48-50, 155, and 1925 edition, pp. 88, 90, 273;
G. Huard, 'Nattier 1685 à 1766', in L. Dimier, Les Peintres français du XVIIIe siècle. Histoire des vies et catalogue des oeuvres, Paris and Brussels 1930, vol. II, p. 104, 129, no. 144;
J.-G. Goulinat, Les Artistes du Salon de 1737, exhibition catalogue, Paris 1930, p. 22, reproduced plate VI;
X. Salmon, Jean-Marc Nattier, exhibition catalogue, Paris 1999, pp. 101-105, cat. no. 19, reproduced. 

Condition

The following condition report is provided by Sarah Walden, who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting has a comparatively recent lining, stretcher and restoration, with a little slightly more recent restoration, perhaps on the occasion of the Exhibition at Versailles in 2000. The corners and sides have sections with a different canvas added, apparently with firm machine sewn seams, evidently in areas where an original highly decorated frame curved round the corners and along the sides. The original canvas at the top and base sides has quite narrow hand sewn extensions. There is a certain amount of older retouching not only in the side additions and corners but fairly freely strengthening some of the shadows, the hollows in the drapery, the more shadowy parts of the background, and emphasizing some outlines etc. This more or less cosmetic surface strengthening is very slightly darkening in places, with a few distracting touches for instance on the neck of Justice and under her chin. Occasional small adjustments have been made in the recent restoration. Some of the past retouching is simply to smooth over a particular quirk in the sometimes premature craquelure, for instance of the shadow under Justice’s lower arm. There are however no apparent accidental damages at all. The beautiful original brushwork of the head shows fine pentimenti for instance in the nostril. Characteristic eighteenth century circular craquelure can be seen in her neck and elsewhere, and the fine original paint texture continues throughout regardless of the various seemingly gratuitous free surface retouching in places. This report was not done under laboratory conditions.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Catalogue Note

This painting is one of Nattier's most important Royal commissions, and an equally impressive and rare surviving example of his work in a vein other than portraiture. It was commissioned by Jean-Philippe d'Orléans (1702-1748), the Grand Master or Grand Prieur of the Knights of the Order of Malta in France for the decoration of his Parisian residence the Palais du Temple (fig. 3). Nattier's patron was the illegitimate son of Philippe d’Orléans, nephew and son in law of Louis XIV, and his mistress Madame d’Argenton. He had been appointed by his father as Grand Prior of the Knights Templar in 1719, an appointment which required the permission of the Pope, Clement XI. His grandmother, the Dowager Duchesse d'Orléans, drily remarked in her Memoirs that '...he (the Duc d'Orléans) intends to make him a Knight of Malta, so that he may live unmarried, for my son does not wish to have the illegitimate branches of his family extended. The Chevalier does not want wit; but he is a little satirical, a habit which he takes from his mother'. A popular but somewhat indistinct character, Jean-Philippe was occasionally used by his father the Regent or his cousin Louis XV on diplomatic missions, but apart from a long career as 'Genéral des galères' his public profile was most prominent as an important patron of the arts. At his death he left debts of over a million livres.

The Grand Prior's residence in the Temple had recently been re-designed by the Regent’s architect Gilles-Marie Oppenord (1672-1742). The principal parts of the commission for the decoration of the interior apartments had originally been entrusted to the painter Jean Raoux (1677-1734). Raoux had been painter to the previous Grand Prieur Philippe de Vendôme (d. 1727), who Philippe d’Orleans had succeeded in 1720 after he had resigned his post. But Raoux left his position, seemingly for personal reasons which remain unclear, and departed the Temple in 1731 for the rue St. Honoré, where he resided until his death in February 1734. He left behind an unfinished scheme, which according to his biographer Dezallier d'Argenville, comprised among other works '...demi-figures de Vestales...plusieurs Arts et Sciences personnifiés, telles que l'Astronomie, la Géometrie, l'Histoire..'.1. Nattier was subsequently appointed in his place in December the same year, beating Noël-Nicolas Coypel to the post. He moved in to his lodgings in the Temple, above the main entrance, and took up the scheme once more.

At first Nattier moved slowly on the commission, no doubt very conscious of its scale and importance to his career and standing in Paris, and it was fully three years before the first painting, the Justice, was delivered. Of the seven paintings in all recorded by his biographers Charles Palissot de Montenoy (1768)2 and his daughter Marie-Catherine Tocqué (1854), only three are now known3. The present work was the first of the three, and was installed in the Salon of the Temple early in 1737. It was followed in 1739 by Prudence, (present location unknown)4, and the third, delivered four years later in 1743 was La Force or Fortitude, exhibited at the 1745 Salon and now in a private collection (fig. 2)5.   The remaining four canvases are now lost, but according to the catalogue of the sale of Nattier's effects in 1763 they consisted of another 'Virtue' and two 'Muses' and a 'Feast'(?). The scheme of the four Cardinal Virtues would no doubt have been completed by the figure of Temperance, and the Muses chosen to complement the personifications of Music and Architecture already finished by Jean Raoux6. All of the canvases were originally irregularly shaped to fit into the elaborately carved boiserie panelling of the Temple interior.

Shortly after its installation La Justice was loaned for exhibition at the Paris Salon that same year. It was fulsomely praised in verse in the April edition of the Mercure de France:

'De force et de douceur, quel heureux assemblage
Fair briller ton pinceau dans ce nouvel ouvrage.
Thémis enpunissant ce monstre aux yeux hagards,
Interesse mon âme, attache mes regards;
dela Dinité j'y reconnais l'image;
Elle frappe mes sens, elle parle à mon coeur;
Et pour tribut de mon premier hommage
Je sens qu'en ta faveur
Aujourd'huy (sic) son pouvoir vainqueur
A l'amitié dérobe mon suffrage.'                

The three-quarter length format chosen by Nattier, was no doubt inspired at least in part  by the desire or need for his paintings to conform to those already painted by Raoux for the Temple. A good surviving example of the latter is La Sagesse or Wisdom of 1730 today in Rouen, Museé des Beaux-Arts (fig. 1), which is of much the same size and format, and very similar in design to Nattier's Prudence7. The iconographic scheme seems to have been directly taken from Cesare Ripa's Iconologia, first published in 1593, a Venetian 1645 edition of which Nattier owned. The figure of Justice elegantly smites that of Injustice, who has misappropriated her symbols of the scales of impartilaity and the double edged sword of power, using a golden sceptre similar to the Main de Justice in the regalia of the French Royal family. Similarly Prudence carries a mirror and a serpent, and Fortitude the traditional attributes of a lion, column and sword. The elegant figure of Justice, with the beautiful rendering of the textures and tones of both flesh and satin, amply reveals the extraordinary talent that Nattier was able to draw upon for his enormously successful career as a painter of portraits, where he made a speciality of this contemporary taste for the seductive combination of the mythological and the fashionably undressed. It is most unlikely that Nattier used a specific model for the figure of Justice, or intended her as a portrait, but the brothers Goncourt, writing much later in 1879, used Nattier's reputation to claim the identity of the sitter for La Force as the Duchesse de Châteauroux, and similar claims were made later  for the Duchesse de Lauraguais for Prudence, and Madame Adelaide and Madame de Brionne as Justice.  

 After the death of the Grand Prieur d’Orléans in 1748, the Prince de Conti apparently ordered the sales of his effects for the benefit of the Order of Malta. Either, as Madame Tocqué suggests, Nattier was so upset at the sale that he took the pictures back, or as Palissot de Montenoy wrote in 1768, he returned the part payment he had received from the Order and kept the pictures for himself. In any event the paintings from the Temple were still in Nattier's possession at the time of his death and were surely the 7 dessus-de-port: 4 Virtues, 2 Muses and ‘un dejeuner’ listed in the catalogue of the sale of his effects in 1763. Their subsequent provenance is, however, unclear – they may be the ‘Quatre Vertus Cardinales’ sold from the Dellezenne collection in 19 May 1818 ('Justice, Prudence, Force, a Vestal') and sold together again at the Fleury-Hérard sale in February 1872, where Justice fetched 7,900 francs. The introduction to this catalogued mentioned that – according to tradition- the pictures had formed part of the decoration of the Château de Bellevue, built by Madame de Pompadour and lived in by Mesdames, the daughters of Louis XV, but there is no foundation for this.

 

 

1. A-N. Dezalier d'Argenville, Descriptions de l'Académie Royale del a peinture et de scuilpture par son sécretaire Nicolas Guerin et par Antoine-Nicolas Dezallier d'Argenville le fils, Paris 1762, pp. 379-80, 384.
2. C. Palissot de Montenoy, op. cit., Paris 1768, vol. I, pp.14-15.
3. M-C-P. Tocqué, op. cit., Paris 1854, vol. II, pp. 348-64.
4. Exhibited Paris, Salon, 1740, no. 122: 'un tableau de 4 pieds en quarré représentant la Prudence'. Canvas, signed and dated 1739, 129 by 139 cm, present whereabouts unknown.
5.131 by 114cm, sold New York, Christie's, 2 November 2000, lot 237. Reproduced in  M. Taverner Holmes, 'Lancret, décorateur des 'petits cabinets' de Louis XV à Versailles', in L’Œil, March 1985, p. 28. The painting was also engraved by Baléchou in 1750.
6. Both now in Schloss Charlottenberg, Berlin. Reproduced  in Salmon, op. cit.,1999-2000, p. 104, figs. 5 and 6. In addition, Nattier completed a full length portrait of his patron the Grand Pieur d’Orléans in armour. Over three metres in height, this monumental portrait was exhibited in the Salon of 1738 where it was critically acclaimed. Now lost, its appearance can only be guessed at from old copies.
7. Inv. 981.3.1, 144 by 132.5cm. Canvas, 144.5 by 132.5 cm., signed and dated 1730. reproduced in Salmon, idem., 1999-2000, p. 104, fig. 4.