François Hubert Drouais and Studio

The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com , an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This large and impressive painting is in very good condition. The canvas has been lined and the paint layer is stable. The impasto is still very prominent in the lace of the shirt and in the gold trappings on the coat and waistcoat. The painting is clean and has been recently restored. There is a slightly grainy quality to the paint where it is thinly applied, yet it is not abraded. Above the chair on the left side there is a restoration running horizontally approximately three inches long. There is a fresh scratch above the figure in the frame of the map, which needs to be restored. In the lower right, there is an old damage approximately three inches long and situated to the immediate right of the armor, which has received some restoration. The remainder of the picture is happily devoid of any restoration or damage and is in very good state.
"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."

This youthful depiction of Joseph-Hyacinthe-François de Paul de Rigaud, Comte de Vaudreuil (1740-1817) is a harbinger of his ensuing patriotic patronage of the French school that positioned him as arguably the leading courtier-collector in Paris during Louis XVI's reign.  As proud as he was of his family's origins in Santo Domingo (the modern day island of Haiti), by 1780, he was a leading advocate for contemporary French artists, a position that was unusual at the French Court at Versailles.  He is here depicted pointing at a large map of the islands of his heritage including Santo Domingo and the nearby island of Puerto Rico.  His family's stake in the lucrative West Indies plantation economy that exported fruits and sugar to France had enabled him to create a collection of a stature that equaled those of the prominent financiers of the previous generation.  Though the armor in the portrait's foreground and a smaller map of Germany in the background - where Vaudreuil served as aide-de-camp to the French commander in the Seven Years' War - suggest a certain pride of duty, his was not a distinguished military career.  Far more significant was his commitment to promoting the French arts including painting, poetry and theatre.  He even excelled on stage and produced the first performance of Beaumarchais's Marriage of Figaro in 1783. ¹

At a time when the finest ancien régime collectors were recognized for their Golden Age Dutch and Flemish pictures, Vaudreuil contributed significantly to the growth of "patriotic" collecting in Paris.  By the 1770s, for the first time, French paintings were seen to complement the familiar Dutch and Flemish cabinet pictures in private collections.  As comprehensively as Colin Bailey has portrayed Vaudreuil (see Literature below), particularly as a methodical patron amongst a small group of like-minded collectors, he is careful to remind us that these were a minority of the many collections in Paris towards the end of the ancien régime.  After all, not a single dealer was trading exclusively in contemporary French paintings in the 1780s.  Vaudreuil was equally susceptible to the appealing supply of affordable old masters with his first acquisition being recorded in 1779 at the age of 39.

Ultimately a champion of contemporary painting, Vaudreuil was undiscriminating in terms of the Académie royale's prescribed hierarchy of genres, commissioning and buying history paintings, landscapes and genre scenes from the group of young painters that he cultivated.  While he equally enjoyed buying directly from the artists, at auction or through the Salon, he also relied on the leading dealer, Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun, to acquire on his behalf.  Equally influential was Lebrun's wife, Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun, the noted portraitist who encouraged his interest in contemporary art.  She painted five portraits of Vaudreuil in 1784 alone at a time when it appeared that their relationship might well have been far more intimate.  His coterie of favored artists confirmed his broad interest in contemporary art:  from David and his historical paintings to Boucher and his figural compositions, from Robert and his architectural capriccios to Vernet and his seascapes, from Van Spaendonck and his still lifes to Lagrenée the younger and his biblical scenes and Ménageot and his allegories, all were patronized by Vaudreuil.

Also in 1784, Vaudreuil purchased a house on the rue de la Chaise, just off the Boulevard Saint Germain.  Already Vaudreuil's collection was ranked the third best in Paris, mostly due to his Dutch and Flemish paintings, which included examples of Rubens' religious subject matter and Ruisdael's landscapes.  But that very year, in a seemingly deliberate shift to French painting, he sold his old masters through Lebrun's gallery.   Over the next three years his inclusive collection would come to feature the work of most of the major French artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Poussin, Charles Lebrun, Champaigne, La Hyre, and Le Nain represented the seventeenth century, while Watteau, Fragonard, Greuze, Boucher, and David anchored the eighteenth century.²  Dozens of these paintings can be enjoyed today in public collections, mostly in English, French, and American museums, as well as in noted private collections.

Suddenly, in 1787 at the age of 47, he was forced to sell most of his collection due to financial struggles.  Only two years later, he was one of the first to emigrate due to the Revolution, bringing his frenetic collecting to a crashing halt.  In spite of these troubles, he would live 28 years more, eventually settling in London where he married a young cousin.  So, as short-lived as Vaudreuil's collection had been, he had certainly made the collecting of contemporary pictures fashionable, albeit fleetingly.  And no matter how bad his finances became, or how many creditors persisted in recouping debt, Vaudreuil honored every artist's commission, a stance indicative of the new respect paid to emerging artists and the elevated status they had earned.

The prime version of this picture is in the National Gallery, London and is signed and dated 1758.  This secondary version may have been painted for another family member.  The quality of the treatment of Vaudreuil, particularly his face, hands, lace blouse and clothes, is very high and all appears to be by the hand of Drouais.  The background details appear to have been painted by a studio hand.  Little is known of Drouais' studio practice but it is likely that with a composition of this scale he would have sought studio assistance in its completion, which may account for the discrepancy in quality.   

The son of a portrait painter, Drouais must have first studied with his father and then later with Boucher, Natoire and Carle van Loo; he was agréé in 1754 and finally received into the Académie as a portraitist in 1758. But it was evident even from his first Salon of 1755 that the young artist was able to invest traditional court portraiture with a new informality while still retaining a highly defined sense of elegance. At this Salon, the artist was much admired and seems to have attracted enormous attention. By the following year, he was commissioned to paint family portraits, some on a truly grand scale, such as that in the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., the sitters of which remain unknown (1946.7.4; 96 by 76 1/2  in.). Portrait commissions from the Royal family followed (including the mistresses of the king, Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry), and, given the structure of the court, the nobility quickly sought Drouais' talent. Although Drouais made his career primarily as a society portrait painter in the tradition of Largillièrre and Nattier, his portraits déguisés were very different from theirs. Instead of court ladies depicted in the guise of antique goddesses, Drouais chose to depict his ladies and gentlemen in their element as he does here with this elegant depiction of the Comte de Vaudreuil.

We are grateful to Jason Herrick for his assistance in cataloguing this picture.

1. We are indebted to Colin Bailey for his publications on the sitter, see C.B. Bailey, Patriotic Taste. Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris, New Haven and London 2002, pp. 163-205.
C.B. Bailey, "The comte de Vaudreuil: Aristocratic collecting on the eve of the Revolution", Apollo, 130, 1989, pp. 19-26.
2.  For a full listing of his collection see, J.-B.-P. Lebrun, Catalogue d'une très belle collection de tableaux d'Italie, de Flandres, de Hollande et de France...provenans du cabinet de M. (Vaudreuil), Paris, 26 November 1787.