Jean-Baptiste Greuze

‘Le Petit Mathématicien’

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Lot Closed

April 28, 03:29 PM GMT

Estimate

30,000 - 50,000 GBP

Lot Details

Description

Property from a Private Collection, Japan

Jean-Baptiste Greuze

Tournus 1725 - 1805 Paris

‘Le Petit Mathématicien’

oil on canvas

unframed: 46.2 x 38.3 cm.; 18¼ x 15⅛ in.

framed: 84 x 76 cm.; 33 x 29⅞ in.

Probably Count Nicolas Demidoff (1773–1828), Villa San Donato, Florence;
Thence by descent to his son, Anatole N. Demidoff, Prince of San Donato (1812–1870), Villa San Donato, Florence;
His sale (‘Collections de San Donato’), Paris, Pillet, 26 February 1870, lot 114 (‘L'Etude’);
Count Potocki, Warsaw;
Prince Yousoupoff, Saint Petersburg, before 1905;
With Wildenstein, Buenos Aires, by 1946;
From whom purchased, in 1948, by a private collector;
By whom anonymously sold (‘Property of a Family Collection’), New York, Sotheby's, 14 January 1988, lot 212, for $115,500;
Anonymous sale (‘The Arts of France Sale’), New York, Christie's, 21 October 1997, lot 88, where acquired.

Probably J. Martin and C. Masson, Catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre peint et dessiné de Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Suivi de la liste des gravures exécutées d'après ses ouvrages, Paris 1905, p. 35, cat. nos 497 and 498.

ENGRAVED
Ed. Hedouin.

Greuze's Le Petit Mathématicien appears to have been one of his most popular compositions, attested to by several versions and numerous copies. The prototype is assumed to be the painting in the Musée Fabre, Montpellier, which is presumed to have come from the collection of Duclos-Dufresnoy, Greuze's notary and one of his most important patrons.¹

The present work follows the Montpellier painting closely. When last on the market it was examined by the late Edgar Munhall, who endorsed the attribution to Greuze, and dated the painting to the 1780s, a time when the artist's precarious finances compelled him to produce numerous bust-length genre paintings with a gently moralising tone. The present canvas is an exemplar of Greuze's ability to synthesise portraiture with genre painting, along with his characteristic sympathy for the depiction of children.

J. Martin (see Literature) lists the Demidoff and Yousoupoff collections as provenance for two separate versions of this subject by Greuze. However, the present picture is traditionally believed to have been part of both collections. A version was in a sale on 22 January 1868, lot 20 (listed with dimensions of 46 x 38 cm.), but if the information from the San Donato sale catalogue of 1870 is accurate, that painting cannot be one and the same as the present work, since the San Donato entry records the painting as having been inherited from the collection of Nicolas Demidoff.

¹ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greuze-Le_petit_math%C3%A9maticien.JPG