Pierre-Paul Prud'hon Cluny 1758 - 1823 Paris

Charles-Boulanger de Boisfremont (L.353);
Bears unidentified seal on backing;
A. Marmontel, professeur au Conservatoire, two labels on the backing;
His sales, Paris, Drouot, 25-26 January 1883, lot 228, 120 Francs, and 28-29 March, 1898, lot 52, 720 Francs to Paulme (Manuscript  note in Frick copy of the catalogue states '120 f. à sa vente de 1883.');
Picard (?);
Germain Seligman (bears his collector's mark twice);
Jacques Seligman and Co., Inc., New York

Paris, École des Beaux-Arts, Exposition des Oeuvres de Prud'hon au profit de sa fille, May, 1874, no. 331 (lent by M. Marmontel)

E. de Goncourt, Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, dessiné et gravé de P. Prud'hon, Paris, 1876, p. 271;
A. Forest, Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, Paris, 1924, no. 782;
J. Guiffrey, L'oeuvre de Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, Paris, 1924, no. 782

 

 

Awarded the Prix de Rome in 1784, Prud'hon immediately left for Italy, but during his stay there appears to have made just one copy after a work by an Italian master, a ceiling by Pietro da Cortona.  The pose of this figure seems to have been inspired by that of the Mazarin Venus which was purchased circa 1643 in Rome for the Parisian collection of Cardinal Mazarin, who supposedly presented it to the King.  According to one account, during the revolution the statue was displayed by a M. Beaujon in the Champs Elysée: perhaps the site at which it was admired by Prud'hon (P.P. Bober and R. Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources, London 1986, p. 61, no. 15).