Jacques-Antoine-Marie Lemoine

Marius Paulme (1863-1928), Paris (L.1910);

His sale, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 14 May 1929, lot 138;

Louis Hachette (1870-1941), by 1935;

With Galerie Charpentier, Paris;

Sale, Paris, 6 April 1957, lot 4;

Anonymous sale, New York, Christie's, 24 January 2001, lot 124;

Where acquired by the present owner.

Paris, Hôtel Villayer, Salon de la Correspondance, 26 March 1783;

Copenhagen, Chalottenborg Palace, L’Art français au XVIIIe siècle, 1935, no. 423.

M.C.C. Pahin de la Blancherie, Nouvelles de la République des Lettres et des Arts, 1783, vol. XIII, pp. 103-104;

E. Bellier de la Chavignerie, Les Artistes français du XVIII siècle oubliés ou dédaignés, Paris 1865, p. 117, no. 122;

Vienne, 1866;

E. Bellier de la Chavignerie & L. Auvray, Dictionnaire général des artistes de l'école française depuis l'origine des arts du dessin jusqu'à nos jours; architectes, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs et lithographes, Paris 1882, vol. I, p. 998 (as exhibited in the Salon de la Correspondance of 1785);

N.N. Oursel, Nouvelle biographie normande, Paris 1886, p. 133;

A. Poussier, Notice biographique sur Lemoine (Jacques-Antoine-Marie), peintre miniaturiste (1751-1824), Rouen 1914;

G. Le Breton, “J.-A.-M. Lemoine, peintre rouennais,“ in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1914, p. 31;

L. Schidlof, The Miniature in Europe, In the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, 1964-1965;

E. Bénézit, Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs et Graveurs, Paris 1976, vol. 6, p. 570;

M. Roland Michel & C. Binda, "Un portrait de Madame Du Barry," in Revue de l'Art, 46, 1979;

M. Jeune, “Jacques-Antoine-Marie Lemoine,“ in La Révolution en Haute Normandie, Rouen 1988, p. 289;

N. Jeffares, “Jacques-Antoine-Marie Lemoine (1751-1824),“ in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, February 1999, pp. 99-100, no. 44.

Jacques Antoine-Marie Lemoine’s large scale portrait drawing of Madame Vigée Le Brun, seated in a garden, reading, is a sumptuous feast for the eyes. Not only is it triumphant in execution, but it is equally successful in its embodiment of the French dix-huitième image; one that invokes the extravagance and splendour of the Rococo epoch. The portrait is one of a series of portraits en pied (full-length portraits) that Lemoine produced during the early 1780s. Until Neil Jeffares’ catalogue of Lemoine’s work, published in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1999, very little had been written on the artist’s life and career.  In his opening lines, Jeffares noted the admiration in which Lemoine was held by serious, esteemed collectors and connoisseurs, including Marius Paulme, who once owned this exquisite portrait (see provenance) and the Goncourt brothers, who revered his work, but remarked that despite this no substantial review of the artist’s work had previously been attempted.¹ A certain ambiguity surrounds Lemoine’s training and tutelage. Born in Rouen in 1751, he is often recorded as having been a pupil of Maurice Quentin de La Tour (1704-1788), but accounts differ as to when he is supposed to have entered La Tour’s Paris studio, and there is no concrete evidence to substantiate any working relationship. All the same, Jeffares rightly points out La Tour’s evident stylistic influence on Lemoine’s mature work, especially in the ‘remarkable intensity of the sitter’s gaze captured in so many of his portraits.’² While La Tour excelled as a pastellist, Lemoine’s skills and talent were, however, far more apparent in his portrait drawings, of which this is a paramount example. The tangible textures created by Lemoine in the present work are extraordinary, illustrating his deftness in handling chalk. With great variety of pressure and subtle stumping throughout, accompanied by the skilful application of white heightening, he has achieved a diversity of tones and textures that clearly differentiate the landscape from the figure of Madame Vigée, while still maintaining total visual harmony. 

As Jeffares noted in his Dictionary of Pastellists, the specific type of chalk that Lemoine employed was of the greatest significance to him. The livret published to accompany the Salon of 1796 describes the medium used by Lemoine in one of his exhibits as ‘crayon noir-de-velours de la composition du citoyen Coiffier, rue de Coq Saint Honoré’. Although Lemoine at this stage clearly utilised the chalk produced by the luxury papetier René Coiffier, even this seems not to have met with his total satisfaction, and he took to manufacturing his own materials, which he advertised in a handbill entitled: Manufacture de crayons artificiels / De J.A.M. Lemoine, Peintre, rue J-J Rousseau.³ The booklet elaborates on the type of product available, and its capabilities: ‘les crayons dit de Sauce, pour Estompe, remplacement ceux dits de Velours et n'en ont pas le défaut de graisser ni d'empâter l'Estompe.’⁴ There could be no better example than the present work to illustrate how vital the composition of the chalk was to Lemoine’s ability to create textures, through immensely subtle blending and stumping of the medium. Here in this magnificent portrait, these techniques are given full rein, especially in the passages were the artist mimics the sheen of satin across the surface of his sitter’s dress or creates believable textures in the foliage of the lush garden setting.

Prior to embarking on his more ambitious and large-scale portraits en pied, Lemoine’s drawings were mainly in the same format as the fashionable portrait engravings of the day, which were mostly oval or circular, in profile, with decorative borders. Lemoine’s 1778 portrait of Rosalie Duthé, seated in front of a mirror at her dressing table, marked the beginning of the artist’s exploration of more elaborate compositions and settings for his protagonists.⁵ These grand portraits, as Jeffares observes, concentrated more on complex effects of materials, and concentrated on composition rather than on facial expression.⁶ Another portrait of Mlle Duthe tenant une harpe, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, demonstrates Lemoine’s concern with the overall composition and accompanying decorative elements and objects, here the harp and furniture, which have become perhaps more important than obtaining a true likeness of his sitter.⁷

Lemoine’s portrait of Madame Vigée Le Brun, executed in 1783 and exhibited in the same year at the Salon de Correspondence (alongside works submitted by Madame Le Brun herself), portrays the artist at the age of twenty-eight, seated in a garden, intently reading a letter, the contents of which were clearly so interesting that she has raised her free hand in reaction. A closed garden gate (perhaps symbolic) is visible to the left of the composition and a potted plant sits atop a rocky outcrop on the right. The scene is one that is familiar in the history of art and many analogies can be made with other images of women portrayed in a garden and/or reading letters. Perhaps the most relevant comparisons here are with works by other French eighteenth-century artists, notably Boucher’s renowned portraits of Madame de Pompadour and Fragonard’s series of elegantly attired women in satin dresses. Lemoine continued to explore this genre, exhibiting two more portraits later that same year in the Salon of 1783; Une femme dans le desespoir, and Femme satisfaite.⁸  The artist continued to develop his ideas in this genre of portraiture up until 1791.

The luxury and intimacy of this exceptional portrait encourages us to explore the relationship between artist and sitter. Jeffares, in his 1999 publication, alludes to the fact that Lemoine exhibited his pastels and chalk drawings at the premises of the dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, who was Madame Le Brun's husband, but it is not clear if this working relationship led to Lemoine actually meeting Madame Vigée.⁹ The two artists did, however, both depict a number of the same sitters, including Mmes Dugazon, Duthé, Saint Huberty, Gramont-Caderousse and Molé, and this may also have provided the occasion for them to meet. Furthermore, Jeffares discusses the links that both Lemoine and Madame Le Brun had with the Le Couteulx family.¹⁰ Although the exact circumstances under which the present work was undertaken remain uncertain, Lemoine and his sitter clearly came into contact in various ways. The happy outcome was this ravishing portrait, which captures all the opulence of its time, and also Madame Le Brun’s own allure and beauty, widely recognized by her contemporaries, and abundantly evident in the artist’s own self-portraits (see lot 11).

Madame Vigée Le Brun was a remarkable eighteenth-century figure and a brilliantly accomplished artist, whose works of all types are celebrated in this sale: from her portraits, in oil and pastel, of members of the aristocracy, her chalk and pastel studies of young infants and children, and her outstanding Self-portrait in Traveling Costume, to her evocative and acutely modern landscapes. This portrait by Jacques-Antoine-Marie Lemoine is a fitting tribute to the extraordinarily talented Madame Vigée Le Brun and encapsulates the imagery that defines 18th-Century French art.

¹ N. Jeffares, ‘Jacques-Antoine-Marie Lemoine (1751-1824)’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, February 1999, p. 61

² Ibid, p. 62

³ N. Jeffares, Dictionary of Pastellists before 1800, online edition, under Jacques Antoine-Marie Lemoine, p. 1

⁴ Ibid

⁵ N. Jeffares, op. cit., 1999, cat. no. 21, reproduced

⁶ Ibid., p. 64

⁷ Ibid., cat.no. 27, reproduced p. 64, fig.1

⁸ Ibid., cat. nos. 45 and 46

⁹ Ibid., p. 65

¹⁰ Ibid