Paul Delaroche

Comte Pourtales-Gorgier (acquired directly from the artist)
Darius O. Mills, San Francisco and New York (by circa  1879)
Ogden L. Mills, New York (by descent from the above, his grandfather, and sold, Parke Bernet, April 5, 1938, lot 147, as Odalisque)
Sale: O. Rundle Gilbert Estate Auctioneer, New York, lot 323
The Estate of Jewel C. Rush (and sold: Christie's, New York, February 11, 1997, lot 1, illustrated)
Acquired at the above sale

Henri Delaborde and Jules Goddé, Oeuvre de Paul Delaroche, Paris, 1858, illustrated pl. 39
Edward Strahan, ed. The Art Treasures of America, Philadelphia, 1879, vol.II, p. 45, 50; in the 1977 facsimile edition, vol. II, p. 111, 116 (as Nymph in a Fountain)
Norman D. Ziff, Paul Delaroche, A Study in Ninteenth-Century French History Painting, PhD. dissertation, New York University, 1974, pp. 211-2
Stephen Bann, Paul Delaroche, History Painted, London and Princeton, 1997, p. 245

This work is on paper laid down on a stable cradled panel. Under UV, stippled reinforcements to the contours of the figure fluoresce under UV, as as well as a few small spots in the tree at right.
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The present oil was probably completed in 1844 during Delaroche’s residence in Rome which suggests it was a study for a work of the same subject (now Musée des Beaux-Arts, Besançon) begun the following year and while left unfinished is one of the most powerful of his later career. There are at least eight studies for the Besançon painting in the Louvre, one with an inscription suggesting the subject is Sappho, further supported by the addition of a lyre in the larger work. Such an attribution adds an erotic connotation to the subject, emphasized by the present work's small scale similar to nineteenth century cabinet paintings of female nudity. Recent scholarship has questioned this theory in part because the model for the work was Louise Vernet, the daughter of the artist Horace Vernet, who died in 1845 at only thirty-one (Bann pp. 244-5).  The neoclassical and romantic mood anticipates the work of Delaroche’s students among them Jean-Léon Gérôme whose Cléopâtre et César (see lot 33) as also owned by the Mills family.