Baptiste Pellerin

Private collection,

sale, London, Sotheby's, 7 July 1999, lot 2 (as Etienne Delaune),

where acquired by Diane A. Nixon

New York, The Morgan Library & Museum; Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings, 2007, no. 18 (as Etienne Delaune) (entry by Margaret Morgan Grasselli)

Until relatively recently, Etienne Delaune (1518/19-1583), to whom this superb, refined drawing on vellum was formerly attributed, was considered a brilliant but somewhat isolated figure, responsible for a large proportion of the finest designs made for goldsmiths and engravers in France towards the end of the 16^th century. The great collector Pierre Jean Mariette sang his praises, and for more than two centuries this lead was unquestioningly followed by scholars. It was only in 1997 that Valérie Auclair first pointed out that for chronological reasons a number of drawings that had always been attributed to Delaune could not in fact be by him,¹ since when various scholars have developed a much richer and more complex image of the artists who were actually behind the flowering of ornament and print design in late 16th century France. In 2019, the current state of scholarship in this highly sophisticated visual realm was presented in the definitive exhibition, Graver la Renaissance. Étienne Delaune et les arts decoratifs, mounted jointly by the Grand Palais in Paris and the Musée national de la Renaissance – château d’Écouen.

The most important and interesting personality who has been brought into focus by this scholarly revision is Baptiste Pellerin, whose name appears to have been more or less unknown from the time of his death until the mid-20^th century, but who has now emerged as a major figure of great artistic merit, whose drawing style – as the Nixon drawing demonstrates – is as refined and accomplished as that of Delaune, Cousin or any of his other contemporaries. We are grateful to Dominique Cordellier for suggesting the attribution of the present work to Pellerin. Only in 2014 were the range and quality of his achievements finally fully studied, with the publication of a major monograph from which it is abundantly clear that the present drawing is a very typical, if particularly fine, example of Pellerin’s draftsmanship.² As it turns out, a considerable number of the designs for prints engraved and published by Delaune, designs that had always also been attributed to him due to the lack of any other designer’s name on the plates, were actually provided by Pellerin. He was also very active as a designer of silverwork and ornament and in the production of independent drawings on vellum, such as this.

Though it would clearly not be possible to transfer the design of such a drawing on vellum directly onto a copper plate, or indeed onto any other recipient matrix, this type of drawing did none the less serve as the basis for works in many other media. As Margaret Morgan Grasselli noted in her 2007 entry for the drawing (see Exhibited), the densely worked composition, in which the figures and their watery surroundings fill the space entirely with swirling, ornamental forms, suggests that in this case the drawing was most likely a design for a low relief to adorn a precious object. Grasselli makes the ingenious suggestion that the presence of two cups in the design may even indicate it was intended for the rim of a vessel of this type.

Although the majority of the subjects depicted by Pellerin or Delaune are biblical or allegorical, here we see a subject from mythology: the triumph of the sea-nymph Galatea, who is shown riding on a scallop shell drawn by two dolphins. Beside her sits Venus, and the couple seated on the beaked sea creature to the left could be Vertumnus and Pomona.

For another representation of the Triumph of Galatea in the Nixon Collection, see the exceptional drawing by Guercino, formerly in the collection of Pierre Jean Mariette (lot 38).

^1.V. Auclair, ‘La place de l’invention dans les arts graphiques au XVI^e siècle. L’exemple des Arts Libereaux’, dissertation, Paris, Université de Paris IV, 1997

^2.M. Grivel, G.-M. Leproux and A. Nassieu-Maupas, Baptiste Pellerin et l’art parisien de la Renaissance, Rennes 2014