Louis Jean François Lagrenée

Commissioned by Madame Marie Adélaïde de France (1732-1800), Versailles and Meudon;

Willliam Petty, Second Earl of Shelburne and First Marquess of Lansdowne (1737-1805), Bowood Park, Wiltshire;

His posthumous sale, London, Peter Coxe, Burrell, and Foster, 25 February 1906, lot 86);

Where sold for 8 pounds, 8 shillings.

L.J.F. Lagrenée, "Catalogue de l'oeuvre peint de Lagrenée," p. 271, cat. no. 257 ("Dianne et Endimion e L'autre des Baigneuses apport a Madame adelaide de france....1296"), Paris, Institut national d'histoire d'art, MS. 50;

E. and J. de Goncourt, Portraits intimes du dix-huitième siècle, Paris 1878, p. 348, cat. no. 257;

M. Sandoz, Les Lagrenée, I, Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée, dit l'Ainé (1725-1805), Paris 1983, pp. 243-244;

J. Assémat-Tessandier, Louis Lagrenée, dit l'Aîné, 1725-1805, Paris 2022, p. 336, cat. no. 690 P (as whereabouts unknown).

Louis Jean François Lagrenée was the paterfamilias of a dynasty of French painters who enjoyed considerable success during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Lagrenée excelled in small-scale, delicately executed works on copper, particularly intimate scenes of female figures. Indeed, the standing bather in the present work, recalls the figure of Diana in a slightly later work on panel.¹

A Note on Provenance

This painting along with its pendant, Diana and Endymion, were commissioned in 1775 by Marie Adélaïde de France, the fourth daughter of King Louis XV and Queen Marie Leszczyńska.² Marie Adélaïde paid 1296 livres for the pair, both of which were executed on copper. Sometime thereafter, likely following Marie Adélaïde's departure for Italy in the wake of the French Revolution, the work, along with Female Instruction, a scene depicting Saint Anne teaching the Virgin to read,³ entered the collection of the Irish-born William Petty, an important politician, who, over the course of his four-decades career advocated various reformist policies, including religious toleration and free trade.

We are grateful to Dr. Joseph Assémat-Tessandier for confirming that the present work corresponds with cat. no. 690 P in his recent catalogue raisonné and for fully endorsing the attribution to Lagrenée.

¹ Assémat-Tessandier 2022, cat. no. 745 P; Amiens, Musée de Picardie, cat. no. M.P. 418.

² Assémat-Tessandier 2022, cat. no. 689 P; whereabouts unknown.

³ Assémat-Tessandier 2022, cat. no. 649 P; private collection.