Charles-Joseph Natoire

Possibly Natoire's posthumous sale, Paris, Hôtel d'Aligre, 14 December 1777 onwards, lot 93, 'Orphée, qui charme les Nymphes, les Driades les animaux au son de sa lyre; ce morceau à gouasse est de forme en travers, sur papier blanc.';
possibly sale, Paris, Lair-Dubreuil, Hôtel Drouot, 26-27 May 1921, lot 358, 'Orphée charmant les animaux. Dessin à la plume et à l'acquarelle. Signé. Cadre ancien.';
with Jean-Luc Baroni, London, Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, 2005, no. 31

Possibly Ferdinand Boyer, 'Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre de Charles Natoire, peintre du roi,' Archives de l'art français, 1949, p. 87, no. 473

Laid down. Overall in good condition with colors remaining fresh. Light scattered foxing throughout the sheet, barely visible. A vertical crease running through the middle of the sheet. Sold in a decorative gilded frame.
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This impressive sheet, enriched by colored washes and white heightening, is related to a painting of the same subject, which is still together with its pendant, Adonis Dying in the Arms of Venus, in a private collection.¹   The paintings were executed in 1757, while Natoire was living in Rome as director of the French Academy.  It seems that they were commissioned by Lallement de Betz and are referred to by Natoire in a letter in February 1757 as: 'deux petits morceaux de la fable que je destine à M. de Bert, fermier gènèral...'.² 

Typically for Natoire, the present composition is also known in three other drawn versions, all autograph and fully signed, and all of similar dimensions to this drawing, but executed in a variety of media. One, in the Musée Atger in Montpellier is in pen and brown ink and wash, heightened with white, on blue paper.  Another, in the Jeffrey E. Horvitz collection, is in the same media as the Montpellier drawing, but on white paper.  A third example is in the Lehman collection, at the Metropolitan Museum.³  Jean-François Méjanès, in the Horvitz catalogue, also reproduces a study in black chalk just for the figure of Orpheus, in the Louvre.⁴   Méjanès writes: ' During his period in Rome, especially in the 1770s toward the end of his life, Natoire often reworked or redrew his designs and then colored them with either watercolor or gouache.'

Susanna Caviglia-Brunel will include this drawing as no. D.537 in her forthcoming monograph on Natoire, to be published by Arthena in March 2012.

1.  P. Rosenberg, 'A propos de Natoire,' Dessins français aux XVII^e et XVIIII^e siècles: Actes du colloque, École du Louvre, 24 et 25 juin 1999, Paris 2003, p. 347, reproduced fig. 4
2.  Ibid., p. 349 
3.  Mastery & Elegance, Two Centuries of French Drawings from the Collection of Jeffrey E. Horvitz, exhib. cat., Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Art Museums, et al., 1998-2000, pp. 222-3, no. 57, all reproduced
4.  Inv. no. 31392; ibid., p. 222,  reproduced fig. 1