Lot n° 53
Estimation :
40000 - 60000
EUR
Result with fees
Result
: 166 400EUR
Jean-Baptiste GREUZE (Tournus 1725 - Paris 1805) - Lot 53
Jean-Baptiste GREUZE (Tournus 1725 - Paris 1805)
Self-portrait
Canvas
61,3 x 50,1 cm
Bears old labels on the back of the frame: the label of the 1882 sale and "Portraits du Siècle /145".
(Old restorations and small lacks in the lower right corner)
Provenance:
Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, Me Escribe, expert Haro, April 1, 1882, No. 12, as "Attributed to Greuze": "Jean Baptiste Greuze, his portrait by himself. Greuze is represented from three quarters in his workshop costume. The head is full of truth and charm. Very careful execution, full of verve.
Canvas, 60 x 50 cm".
Bibliography :
- Camille Mauclair, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Paris, 1906, p. 70, no. 1142.
- Jean Martin, Œuvre de J.-B. Greuze, Catalogue raisonné suivi de la liste des gravures exécutées d'après ses ouvrages, Paris, 1908, n° 1142.
Like Rembrandt, Courbet and Picasso, Greuze never ceased to represent himself throughout his life, as shown by several of his famous self-portraits.
Around 1755, he shows himself from three quarters, aged about thirty, in artist's clothing, with a brush in his hand (Musée Greuze, Tournus). Later, around 1780, he painted himself twice in the same pose, with a brown coat and a brush, aged fifty-five (Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg and Musée des Beaux-Arts, Marseille). The austere effigy of 1785 shows the artist five years later, at the age of sixty, in a three-quarter bust. He is wearing a blue coat, vest and white tie (Musée du Louvre, Paris). The last one, in 1804, a year before his death, shows him at the age of sixty-nine, wearing a similar outfit and posture to the one in the Hermitage painting (Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix).
In our self-portrait, which we situate during the 1760s, Greuze adopts a very simple pose, with his chest in profile and his gaze turned towards the viewer, wearing a blue jacket under which we can guess a white shirt and a lace jabot, a "negligee" that most artists adopt in their representation. The chromatic range between gray and blue of the clothes and the background, the powdered hair, enhance the luminosity of the face and underline the expression that emerges from the lively gaze of the model. The touch is slightly freer, more in paste at the level of the forehead, there also to catch the light.
In the 1760's, Jean-Baptiste Greuze can be proud of his career: he reached great fame thanks to his moral genre scenes such as The Village Accordion, presented at the Salon of 1761 (Louvre Museum), The Filial Piety at the Salon of 1763 (Hermitage Museum), or The Beloved Mother at the Salon of 1769 (Laborde collection in Madrid). He also received important commissions as a portraitist. Diderot praised him in his reviews of the salons, which he sent to Frédéric-Melchior Grimm, seeing in him the spearhead of the revival of French painting. The end of the decade became darker: in 1769 Jean-Baptiste Greuze was accepted and approved at the Academy as a painter of genre scenes and not as a "history painter".
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