PAUL MATHEY | PORTRAIT OF LÖYS-HENRI DELTEIL

Private Collection, France 

Acquired from the above by the present owner 

L. Giraud-Badin, Catalogue de Livres Relatifs aux Beaux-Arts...provenant de la bibliotheque de Feu M. Löys Delteil, Paris, 1931, illustrated as a frontispiece 

Loÿs-Henri Delteil was a French collector, engraver, lithographer, and publisher. He began collecting prints at the age of thirteen. Delteil published a thirty-one volume catalogue of eighteenth and nineteenth century printmakers and was regarded as an important expert and connoisseur of the medium. Paul Mathey has fittingly included a collection of prints in the composition. 

Paul Mathey was a student of Léon Coignet and later Isidor Pils at the École des Beaux-Arts. He was awarded many medals at the Salon des Artistes Français and was named a chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1889. Portraiture comprised an important part of his oeuvre; among his other subjects are Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, Edgar Degas and the composer Charles Camille Saint-Saens. Mathey himself, like the subject of the present work, was a collector of prints, and had an important collection of etchings by Rembrandt.