Alexis Grimou

Anonymous sale, Paris, Tajan, 9 April 1991, lot 41;
Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 29 April 2010, lot 59.

This charming portrait sketch of a young boy looking over his shoulder is entirely typical of Grimou's artistic output. A pupil of Jean-François de Troy, Grimou took from his master a warm palette and added to it an audacity of handling which places him squarely in the 18th century.

The significance of Grimou's portraits for the development of French eighteenth-century art has not yet been fully appreciated. Often intimate in nature and executed with brushstrokes of a great spontaneity, works like the present clearly provoked the fantasy portraits later sketched by Jean-Honoré Fragonard who, moreover, painted pastiches in Grimou’s manner. The format, palette, composition and virtuoso handling evident in Fragonard's Young Woman in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, are so close to Grimou that, until the recent discovery of Fragonard's signature, the work was at one time believed to be by him.¹ Grimou’s influence can also be discerned in the work of Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Grimou himself sought inspiration from the Dutch Golden Age, with a debt to Rembrandt seen here in the beautifully rendered chiaroscuro.

1. P. Murray, Dulwich Picture Gallery: A Catalogue, London 1980, p. 65, cat. no. 74, reproduced.