.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Innovative painter, draftsman and printmaker, Jean Baptiste Le Prince made two consequential contributions to the artistic culture of his time. He was one of the earliest practitioners – if not the actual inventor – of an aquatint printing process that revolutionized printmaking in the late 1760s. And he popularized a type of genre painting known as ‘russeries’ – picturesque renderings of Russian subjects, settings and costumes – that was comparable to the better-known genres of ‘chinoiserie’ and ‘turquerie’, and appealed to the widespread French interest in ‘exotic’ foreign cultures.
Le Prince was born in Metz, a city in northeast France near Nancy, in 1734; his father was an ornamental sculptor and at least one brother was a musician. After studying art briefly in his hometown, Le Prince was taken to Paris around 1750 by the maréchal de Belle-Isle, the military commander of Metz, to enter the studio of François Boucher, the most successful and celebrated painter in France. Boucher’s influence on Le Prince was profound, and during his brief apprenticeship with the master, the young artist would form the foundations of the painting style — bright coloring, cheerful subject matter, fluid and creamy brushwork — that he maintained throughout his career.
In 1752, aged 18, Le Prince married Marie Guiton, a rich woman twice his age. It was an unhappy union and after two years together, he left his wife for study in Rome, a trip presumably paid for with her support. He was, by all accounts, little affected by what he saw in the Eternal City, and few traces of Italian influences are discernable in any of his subsequent works. Le Prince’s only known paintings from this period are a few small landscapes which were engraved in 1756 by the Abbé de Saint-Non.
Back in Paris by 1758, Le Prince decided to escape his failed marriage permanently and seek his fortune in Russia, a country whose recent emergence as one of the great powers of Europe made it a site of increasing fascination to the French. During the 20-year reign of the Empress Elizabeth (1709-1761), daughter of Peter the Great, a rapid program of westernization was undertaken in Russia’s capital city, as Elizabeth imported French art, music, dance and food to St. Petersburg. By imperial decree, state theatres opened in Moscow and the capital, and an Academy of Fine Arts was founded in St.Petersburg; Russia was France’s ally in the Seven
Years War; and Elizabeth adopted French as the language of her court. The success of other French artists who had travelled to Russia may also have encouraged Le Prince to make the trip. The painter Louis-Joseph Le Lorrain (1715-1759) had been invited in 1758 to become the Director of the newly established Academy, and took with him the young draftsman Jean Michel Moreau le Jeune (1741-1814), as Professor of Drawing. Le Prince would almost certainly have known Nicolas Gillet (1709-1791), a minor sculptor from Metz who had taken up a professorship there, too, and the celebrated portraitist Louis Tocqué (1696-1772), was also working in Russia in 1757-1758, to considerable acclaim. Perhaps even more appealing, Le Prince had relatives who had already made the move. His brother Marie François Le Prince, a musician, had received commissions from the Imperial court and seems to have resided in St. Petersburg, and his sister and brother-in-law were also in Russia, the latter serving as a professor of Languages at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Carrying an introduction from his old protector, the maréchal de Belle-Isle to the Marquis de l’Hôpital, French Ambassador in Russia, Le Prince soon received a commission for forty ceiling paintings in the newly constructed Winter Palace. Although Le Prince remained in Russia for at least four years, little is known of his movements there. He seems to have travelled widely, perhaps, as far as Siberia, and made the large body of drawings and sketches of contemporary Russian life, its customs, rituals and costumes that he used as the basis for much of his later work. The inventory of his estate included `12 small notebooks containing sketches made from life in Russia', as well as Russian costumes, some full sized, some made in miniature to fit diminutive mannequins. Bachaumont recorded that Le Prince also kept miniature models of Russian buildings, wagons, sleighs and tools to use as guides in his work.
Le Prince returned to Paris in late 1763. According to Mariette, he had left France a mediocre artist and come home a master. In February 1764, the artist presented himself to the Académie Royale, where he was received as a member on 23 August 1765, upon the presentation of his painting The Russian Baptism (fig. 1; Louvre, Paris), perhaps his first – and certainly his best-known– painting of Russian subject matter. Depicting four Orthodox priests performing the traditional ritual baptism of a newborn in an elaborate silver font, it was exhibited to acclaim in the annual Paris Salon that year, the first in which the artist participated. Denis Diderot praised it with characteristic wit: `…a beautiful ceremony and a beautiful painting. It’s the artist’s reception piece. How many names do you think we’d read in the [Salon] catalogue, if everyone had to produce a painting this good to gain admission to the Académie?'
The Russian Baptism was one of 15 paintings of Russian subjects that Le Prince included in the Salon of 1765 – indeed, all of the pictures he exhibited that year would be russeries, as would most of those he showed in each of the subsequent two Salon exhibitions, a clear indication of the popularity of the genre with collectors and the public, and the degree to which his rising reputation was associated with it. In addition to the great ’The Cabak’, a Tavern outside Moscow (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm) — one of Le Prince’s largest (97 x 146 cm.) and most complete, multifigural Russian compositions — the highlights of the Salon of 1769 were the present pair of oval paintings depicting The Russian Dance and The Seesaw. Although Diderot found them ‘too sketchy’ for his taste, to contemporary eyes, their fresh palette and delicate, rapid brushwork imbue the paintings with an immediacy and vivacity that continue to exert irresistible charm.
No sketches made in Russia have been identified in connection with the Stafford paintings, but The Russian Dance is closely associated with a finished drawing of the same subject that was made as an illustration for the Voyage en Sibérie (Voyage in Siberia) by the Abbé Jean Chappe d’Auteroche (1722-1769), published in 1768, the same year as the Stafford paintings. The book was an account of Russia written by Chappe, an astronomer and member of the French Academy of Sciences, who had established his reputation in 1752 with the translation into French of Edmund Halley’s astronomical tables. In November 1760, Chappe
travelled from Paris to Tobolsk, capital of Siberia, to observe the Transit of Venus that took place on 6 June 1761. He reported his findings to the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg on 8 January 1762, and returned to Paris in August of that year. Chappe published his astronomical observations, together with a general account of his travels, in the Voyage en Sibérie in 1768. (He departed soon after the publication date for California to observe another Transit of Venus, due to occur on 3 June 1769, and died shortly thereafter in San Jose of a contagion that killed several other members of his expedition.) The abbé engaged Le Prince in 1764 to illustrate his book; many of Le Prince’s 32 drawings for the project bear that date. (The original sheets, executed in pen, ink and wash, are all in the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia.) Chappe and Le Prince were in Russia at the same time, both under the protection of the French ambassador and moving in the same court circles, and it seems likely they met there in 1761 and 1762; in any event, as a talented draftsman who knew printmaking and had observed Russia at first hand himself, Le Prince was the obvious choice to engage on the project.
Le Prince’s finished illustrations included scenes that were minutely described by Chappe in his text, and the artist relied on his own detailed sketch books to compose the images. One of the finest illustrations is of The Russian Dance, which faithfully reflects Chappe’s evocation of the event: ‘A Russian dance is sometimes a kind of pantomime, which demands much agility and grace. Only young people can dance, and they do it with singular skill: they turn on one foot, almost sitting down, and get up again in an instant to assume a bizarre and grotesque position, which they change from moment to moment, advancing, retreating, or turning around the room. They often dance alone, or with a woman who stands almost still…’
The Stafford Russian Dance closely follows Le Prince’s drawing for the Voyage en Siberie, but with significant compositional variations. The setting is now the rustic countryside, rather than a village, and the dance occurs under the stripped awning of a tent, not in front of a building. But Chappe’s enthusiasm for Russian dancing is amply conveyed and the image is full of ‘exotic’ touches that French viewers would have found picturesque, such as the elaborate and luxurious Tartar costumes and the balalaika-playing musicians. Significantly, while maintaining the flavor of the Russian setting and many of its distinctive accoutrements, Le Prince subtly adapts the image to prevailing French taste and the conventions of rococo image-making: in the 1764 drawing, the male dancer bends his legs deep to the ground, while his partner stands upright and almost still, as Chappe observed of actual Russian dancers; in the painting, however, the couple dances together in a manner that accords with contemporary French conventions. Indeed, the couple is remarkably reminiscent of Watteau’s dancers in his celebrated Fetes Venitiennes (c.1719; National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh), right down to the male dancer’s turban and open frock coat.
The delightful pendant to The Russian Dance depicts playing on a seesaw, and while no image of seesaws appears in the Voyage, Chappe does note that this amusement was a favorite summer pastime for Russian girls. Here again, Le Prince has rendered carefully observed depictions of Russian costumes and architecture, no doubt based on his original sketchbooks, but the depiction itself hews closely to popular rococo imagery found in the works of French painters of an earlier generation, such as Nicolas Lancret (c. 1723; Cleveland Museum of Art), and contemporaries of Le Prince such as Fragonard (c. 1755, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid). Whereas other painters – Fragonard, in particular – had employed the theme of the seesaw, with its rhythmic rise and fall, as a metaphor for the act of lovemaking, Le Prince disregarded any erotic interpretation and reintroduced an air of social conviviality and playful childhood innocence to the subject. Both The Russian Dance and The Seesaw display a liveliness of touch and handling, a sparkling, clear, jewel-like palette, and an infectious joie de vivre which make them among Le Prince’s most captivating paintings.
The success of his ‘russeries’ inspired Le Prince to reproduce the most popular subjects in different media for a variety of audiences (figs. 2 and 3). An earlier pair of paintings, signed and dated 1764 and 1765, treats subjects similar to the Stafford paintings with slight differences (sold, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 29-31 May 1890, lots 168 & 169). In another pair, sold at Christie’s (London, 26 November 1971), the motif of the seesaw is treated in comparable fashion but paired with a scene of fortune-telling. An oval pen and wash drawing of the Russian Dancers depicts the dancers in postures nearly identical to those in the Stafford paintings (fig. 4). And in the Salon of 1769, where it was exhibited with the Stafford paintings, Le Prince included what would become a famous and widely distributed print of The Russian Dance, with variations and in rectangular format, that was one of 20 prints exhibited and made in his new aquatint process, which allowed him to reproduce the effects and qualities of a pen and wash drawing with remarkable fidelity (fig. 5).
As noted by Eric Zafran (1983), the distinguished provenance of the present pair of paintings “is witness to the spell they have cast over knowledgeable connoisseurs,” from their first owner, Vicomte Adolphe du Barry, who must have acquired them immediately after their appearance in the 1769 Salon, to Mrs. Frederick Stafford, who purchased them in 1971. Adolphe du Barry (1749-1778), was the son of the Comte Jean du Barry, the war contractor and notorious rake known as ‘le Roué’, and nephew of Madame du Barry who, despite being the mistress of Louis XVI, had lived publicly with ‘le Roué’, and married his dissolute younger brother, Guillaume du Barry. Adolphe, who would die in a duel in Bath in 1778, aged 29, had amassed at a very young age a large and important collection
of paintings, mostly Dutch and French, which he sold at auction in Paris in 1774, probably owing to the decline of his fortunes when his aunt fell out of favor with the royal family. The Russian Dance and The Seesaw were sold for 600 livres (a substantial price) as lot 99 in the sale, the catalogue describing them precisely: “Deux tableaux, suivant le costume Russe, composés agréablement, & peints
en 1768 sur toile, de forme ovale. Hauteur 15 pouces, largeur 13 pouces, Dans l’un jeunes filles se balancent, des enfants jouent & des femmes les regardent: dans l’autre qui est composé richement, un homme & une femme dansent.” Additionally, the paintings were reproduced in the famous marginal illustrations of the sale made by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (fig. 6).
Le Prince was born in Metz, a city in northeast France near Nancy, in 1734; his father was an ornamental sculptor and at least one brother was a musician. After studying art briefly in his hometown, Le Prince was taken to Paris around 1750 by the maréchal de Belle-Isle, the military commander of Metz, to enter the studio of François Boucher, the most successful and celebrated painter in France. Boucher’s influence on Le Prince was profound, and during his brief apprenticeship with the master, the young artist would form the foundations of the painting style — bright coloring, cheerful subject matter, fluid and creamy brushwork — that he maintained throughout his career.
In 1752, aged 18, Le Prince married Marie Guiton, a rich woman twice his age. It was an unhappy union and after two years together, he left his wife for study in Rome, a trip presumably paid for with her support. He was, by all accounts, little affected by what he saw in the Eternal City, and few traces of Italian influences are discernable in any of his subsequent works. Le Prince’s only known paintings from this period are a few small landscapes which were engraved in 1756 by the Abbé de Saint-Non.
Back in Paris by 1758, Le Prince decided to escape his failed marriage permanently and seek his fortune in Russia, a country whose recent emergence as one of the great powers of Europe made it a site of increasing fascination to the French. During the 20-year reign of the Empress Elizabeth (1709-1761), daughter of Peter the Great, a rapid program of westernization was undertaken in Russia’s capital city, as Elizabeth imported French art, music, dance and food to St. Petersburg. By imperial decree, state theatres opened in Moscow and the capital, and an Academy of Fine Arts was founded in St.Petersburg; Russia was France’s ally in the Seven
Years War; and Elizabeth adopted French as the language of her court. The success of other French artists who had travelled to Russia may also have encouraged Le Prince to make the trip. The painter Louis-Joseph Le Lorrain (1715-1759) had been invited in 1758 to become the Director of the newly established Academy, and took with him the young draftsman Jean Michel Moreau le Jeune (1741-1814), as Professor of Drawing. Le Prince would almost certainly have known Nicolas Gillet (1709-1791), a minor sculptor from Metz who had taken up a professorship there, too, and the celebrated portraitist Louis Tocqué (1696-1772), was also working in Russia in 1757-1758, to considerable acclaim. Perhaps even more appealing, Le Prince had relatives who had already made the move. His brother Marie François Le Prince, a musician, had received commissions from the Imperial court and seems to have resided in St. Petersburg, and his sister and brother-in-law were also in Russia, the latter serving as a professor of Languages at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Carrying an introduction from his old protector, the maréchal de Belle-Isle to the Marquis de l’Hôpital, French Ambassador in Russia, Le Prince soon received a commission for forty ceiling paintings in the newly constructed Winter Palace. Although Le Prince remained in Russia for at least four years, little is known of his movements there. He seems to have travelled widely, perhaps, as far as Siberia, and made the large body of drawings and sketches of contemporary Russian life, its customs, rituals and costumes that he used as the basis for much of his later work. The inventory of his estate included `12 small notebooks containing sketches made from life in Russia', as well as Russian costumes, some full sized, some made in miniature to fit diminutive mannequins. Bachaumont recorded that Le Prince also kept miniature models of Russian buildings, wagons, sleighs and tools to use as guides in his work.
Le Prince returned to Paris in late 1763. According to Mariette, he had left France a mediocre artist and come home a master. In February 1764, the artist presented himself to the Académie Royale, where he was received as a member on 23 August 1765, upon the presentation of his painting The Russian Baptism (fig. 1; Louvre, Paris), perhaps his first – and certainly his best-known– painting of Russian subject matter. Depicting four Orthodox priests performing the traditional ritual baptism of a newborn in an elaborate silver font, it was exhibited to acclaim in the annual Paris Salon that year, the first in which the artist participated. Denis Diderot praised it with characteristic wit: `…a beautiful ceremony and a beautiful painting. It’s the artist’s reception piece. How many names do you think we’d read in the [Salon] catalogue, if everyone had to produce a painting this good to gain admission to the Académie?'
The Russian Baptism was one of 15 paintings of Russian subjects that Le Prince included in the Salon of 1765 – indeed, all of the pictures he exhibited that year would be russeries, as would most of those he showed in each of the subsequent two Salon exhibitions, a clear indication of the popularity of the genre with collectors and the public, and the degree to which his rising reputation was associated with it. In addition to the great ’The Cabak’, a Tavern outside Moscow (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm) — one of Le Prince’s largest (97 x 146 cm.) and most complete, multifigural Russian compositions — the highlights of the Salon of 1769 were the present pair of oval paintings depicting The Russian Dance and The Seesaw. Although Diderot found them ‘too sketchy’ for his taste, to contemporary eyes, their fresh palette and delicate, rapid brushwork imbue the paintings with an immediacy and vivacity that continue to exert irresistible charm.
No sketches made in Russia have been identified in connection with the Stafford paintings, but The Russian Dance is closely associated with a finished drawing of the same subject that was made as an illustration for the Voyage en Sibérie (Voyage in Siberia) by the Abbé Jean Chappe d’Auteroche (1722-1769), published in 1768, the same year as the Stafford paintings. The book was an account of Russia written by Chappe, an astronomer and member of the French Academy of Sciences, who had established his reputation in 1752 with the translation into French of Edmund Halley’s astronomical tables. In November 1760, Chappe
travelled from Paris to Tobolsk, capital of Siberia, to observe the Transit of Venus that took place on 6 June 1761. He reported his findings to the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg on 8 January 1762, and returned to Paris in August of that year. Chappe published his astronomical observations, together with a general account of his travels, in the Voyage en Sibérie in 1768. (He departed soon after the publication date for California to observe another Transit of Venus, due to occur on 3 June 1769, and died shortly thereafter in San Jose of a contagion that killed several other members of his expedition.) The abbé engaged Le Prince in 1764 to illustrate his book; many of Le Prince’s 32 drawings for the project bear that date. (The original sheets, executed in pen, ink and wash, are all in the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia.) Chappe and Le Prince were in Russia at the same time, both under the protection of the French ambassador and moving in the same court circles, and it seems likely they met there in 1761 and 1762; in any event, as a talented draftsman who knew printmaking and had observed Russia at first hand himself, Le Prince was the obvious choice to engage on the project.
Le Prince’s finished illustrations included scenes that were minutely described by Chappe in his text, and the artist relied on his own detailed sketch books to compose the images. One of the finest illustrations is of The Russian Dance, which faithfully reflects Chappe’s evocation of the event: ‘A Russian dance is sometimes a kind of pantomime, which demands much agility and grace. Only young people can dance, and they do it with singular skill: they turn on one foot, almost sitting down, and get up again in an instant to assume a bizarre and grotesque position, which they change from moment to moment, advancing, retreating, or turning around the room. They often dance alone, or with a woman who stands almost still…’
The Stafford Russian Dance closely follows Le Prince’s drawing for the Voyage en Siberie, but with significant compositional variations. The setting is now the rustic countryside, rather than a village, and the dance occurs under the stripped awning of a tent, not in front of a building. But Chappe’s enthusiasm for Russian dancing is amply conveyed and the image is full of ‘exotic’ touches that French viewers would have found picturesque, such as the elaborate and luxurious Tartar costumes and the balalaika-playing musicians. Significantly, while maintaining the flavor of the Russian setting and many of its distinctive accoutrements, Le Prince subtly adapts the image to prevailing French taste and the conventions of rococo image-making: in the 1764 drawing, the male dancer bends his legs deep to the ground, while his partner stands upright and almost still, as Chappe observed of actual Russian dancers; in the painting, however, the couple dances together in a manner that accords with contemporary French conventions. Indeed, the couple is remarkably reminiscent of Watteau’s dancers in his celebrated Fetes Venitiennes (c.1719; National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh), right down to the male dancer’s turban and open frock coat.
The delightful pendant to The Russian Dance depicts playing on a seesaw, and while no image of seesaws appears in the Voyage, Chappe does note that this amusement was a favorite summer pastime for Russian girls. Here again, Le Prince has rendered carefully observed depictions of Russian costumes and architecture, no doubt based on his original sketchbooks, but the depiction itself hews closely to popular rococo imagery found in the works of French painters of an earlier generation, such as Nicolas Lancret (c. 1723; Cleveland Museum of Art), and contemporaries of Le Prince such as Fragonard (c. 1755, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid). Whereas other painters – Fragonard, in particular – had employed the theme of the seesaw, with its rhythmic rise and fall, as a metaphor for the act of lovemaking, Le Prince disregarded any erotic interpretation and reintroduced an air of social conviviality and playful childhood innocence to the subject. Both The Russian Dance and The Seesaw display a liveliness of touch and handling, a sparkling, clear, jewel-like palette, and an infectious joie de vivre which make them among Le Prince’s most captivating paintings.
The success of his ‘russeries’ inspired Le Prince to reproduce the most popular subjects in different media for a variety of audiences (figs. 2 and 3). An earlier pair of paintings, signed and dated 1764 and 1765, treats subjects similar to the Stafford paintings with slight differences (sold, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 29-31 May 1890, lots 168 & 169). In another pair, sold at Christie’s (London, 26 November 1971), the motif of the seesaw is treated in comparable fashion but paired with a scene of fortune-telling. An oval pen and wash drawing of the Russian Dancers depicts the dancers in postures nearly identical to those in the Stafford paintings (fig. 4). And in the Salon of 1769, where it was exhibited with the Stafford paintings, Le Prince included what would become a famous and widely distributed print of The Russian Dance, with variations and in rectangular format, that was one of 20 prints exhibited and made in his new aquatint process, which allowed him to reproduce the effects and qualities of a pen and wash drawing with remarkable fidelity (fig. 5).
As noted by Eric Zafran (1983), the distinguished provenance of the present pair of paintings “is witness to the spell they have cast over knowledgeable connoisseurs,” from their first owner, Vicomte Adolphe du Barry, who must have acquired them immediately after their appearance in the 1769 Salon, to Mrs. Frederick Stafford, who purchased them in 1971. Adolphe du Barry (1749-1778), was the son of the Comte Jean du Barry, the war contractor and notorious rake known as ‘le Roué’, and nephew of Madame du Barry who, despite being the mistress of Louis XVI, had lived publicly with ‘le Roué’, and married his dissolute younger brother, Guillaume du Barry. Adolphe, who would die in a duel in Bath in 1778, aged 29, had amassed at a very young age a large and important collection
of paintings, mostly Dutch and French, which he sold at auction in Paris in 1774, probably owing to the decline of his fortunes when his aunt fell out of favor with the royal family. The Russian Dance and The Seesaw were sold for 600 livres (a substantial price) as lot 99 in the sale, the catalogue describing them precisely: “Deux tableaux, suivant le costume Russe, composés agréablement, & peints
en 1768 sur toile, de forme ovale. Hauteur 15 pouces, largeur 13 pouces, Dans l’un jeunes filles se balancent, des enfants jouent & des femmes les regardent: dans l’autre qui est composé richement, un homme & une femme dansent.” Additionally, the paintings were reproduced in the famous marginal illustrations of the sale made by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (fig. 6).