JULES-ÉLIE DELAUNAY | PORTRAIT OF A LADY, 'MME. B...', HALF-LENGTH, WEARING A BLUE DRESS WITH PINK RIBBONS, AND A FUR WRAP

Private collection, France;

Anonymous sale, Vendôme, Rouillac, 17 March 2019, lot 169.

"Delaunay is an artist who would have been otherwise unknown to me, if I didn’t have another portrait of a woman in my own collection, which I picked up in a small shop on the Left Bank of Paris around ten years ago. Sadly, my portrait does not compete in quality with the painting under offer. This woman, who seems to turn her attention to us, harbors deep thoughts behind her wistful expression."

Otto Naumann

The sitter is depicted wearing an elegant dress with a fur wrap, confronting the viewer with a beautifully languid and direct gaze – the same compositional style as several other vividly characterful portraits executed by Delaunay in the 1870s, such as the portraits of Alphée Dubois (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes),¹ Ernest Legouvé (Musée d’Orsay),² and Madame Raoul Alfred Philippe, of 1877 (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes).³ In the exhibition catalogue of 1878, the sitter is described as 'Mme. B...', who may possibly be identified as one Madame Bouin.⁴ Delaunay worked in the classicist manner of Ingres until, after winning the Prix de Rome, he went to Italy in 1856 and abandoned the ideal of Raphaelesque perfection in favour of the sincerity and severity of the Quattrocentists. Early in his career he concentrated on historical and religious subjects, often combining Christian and Classical motifs; but from around 1870 he focused on portraits. Delaunay received the ‘medaille de Première classe’ in 1878 and became ‘Croix de la légion d’honneur’ in the same year as the present portrait was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle.

¹ https://www.pop.culture.gouv.fr/notice/joconde/07430005923

² https://www.musee-orsay.fr/fr/collections/catalogue-des-oeuvres/notice.html?no_cache=1&nnumid=16337

³ https://www.pop.culture.gouv.fr/notice/joconde/07430005921

⁴ M. Megroz-Cochand, Biography: Elie Delaunay, unpublished doctoral diss., Ecole du Louvre 1972, p. 27.