Jean-Baptiste Greuze

Acquired directly from the artist by Ivan Ivanovich Betskoy (1704-1795), Saint Petersburg and Paris, in 1769,

by whom gifted to the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, Saint Petersburg (L.2699a, with the associated number ‘8-N° 48’),

subsequently transferred in 1924 to the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg,

by whom sold, Leipzig, C.G. Boerner, 4 May 1932, lot 51;

Private collection;

sale, Paris, Christie’s, 25 March 2015, lot 138;

with W.M. Brady & Co., Inc., New York,

where acquired by Diane A. Nixon

The present work, executed in a robust combination of red chalk, is a highly refined and well-preserved example of one of Greuze’s superb, expressive studies of heads, known as têtes d'expression, which he produced from the 1760s on. As noted by Edgar Munhall, these drawings owed a certain debt to the academic exercises advanced by Charles Lebrun in the seventeenth century and therefore play an exciting and important role in the evolution of French history painting.¹ It is, however, their modern sensibility which truly distinguishes these drawings from the work of Lebrun and his followers, providing the viewer with a sense of the sitters' being truly drawn from life and therefore less formulaic in their depiction.

Although an old inscription to the mount suggests that the present work may have served as a study for one of the bonneted children in Greuze’s 1761 masterpiece, L'Accordée de Village (The Village Bride),² there appears to be no compelling connection beyond the sitter type. Instead, as is more commonly the case with these têtes d'expression, the drawing should be viewed as an independent work of art in which Greuze, with little more than sharpened red chalk, is able to demonstrate his mastery of the medium in such exquisite fashion.

The early provenance of this drawing is also of particular interest as it was originally owned by Ivan Ivanovich Betskoy (1704–1795), a high-ranking official at the court of Catherine II who lived in France and participated in Parisian literary and artistic life from 1756 to 1761. He subsequently became president of the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts for thirty years and during that time bequeathed his collection of some seven thousand sheets to the Academy. In 1924 these works were transferred to the Hermitage, including 162 drawings by Greuze. Many of these works were then redistributed in the 1930s to various museums in Moscow, Yerevan and Krasnodar, while some, such as the Nixon drawing, were auctioned off at C.G. Boerner in 1932 (see Provenance).³ This provides us with the rather unusual and fascinating opportunity to directly trace the provenance of the present work all the way back to the artist.

^1.See E. Munhall, Greuze the Draftsman, exhib. cat., New York, The Frick Collection, 2002, p. 158

^2.Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. no. 5037; https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010062574

^3.See Munhall, op. cit., pp. 28-37