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Lot Essay
Lavishly painted, Claire Tabouret’s regal La promesse (The Promise) (2012) depicts Ye Jinglu, a businessman born in 1881 in the city of Fuzhou, China. From 1907, Ye had his portrait taken annually, a practice he kept up until his death in 1968. Tabouret’s painting looks to the very earliest photograph of Ye, dating from 1901, which captures the young man dressed in a customary outfit of the Qing dynasty complete with a typical ‘mandarin’ jacket. Its romantic title conjures the sense of expectation in his pose. Found photographs are an important source of inspiration for Tabouret. The focus on Ye’s clothing is also characteristic of the artist, whose eye is well attuned to fashion, material, and style. Indeed, her admiration for the decorative is unmistakable in La promesse. There is an abundance of detail in the painting, from the luscious, gleaming silk of the jacket to the starched white of Ye’s undershirt, and the hints of pattern in the rug. Conveying these rich, tactile materials in diaphanous layers of pigment, the painting conjures a bygone world, on the verge of melting away. As a winner of the 2012 Prix Yishu 8, Tabouret spent several months on a residency that year in Beijing, concluding in C’était le printemps, her first international solo show. The Chinese setting may have influenced her choice of subject in the present painting.
Born in Pertuis, France, Tabouret’s initial encounters with art history came in the form of printed images and, later, visits to the Musée Fabre in Montpellier. As a young artist, she drew inspiration from French history, particularly its nineteenth-century painters including Gustave Courbet, Frédéric Bazille, Berthe Morisot and Édouard Manet; both the tonalities and sumptuous brushwork of her paintings speak to this past. With its protagonist in front of a neutral backdrop, La promesse is particularly reminiscent of Manet’s portraits of actors, matadors and musicians, which depict his subjects within an undefined expanse. Certainly, with his upright stature and commanding stare, Ye would have been a fitting sitter for Manet. Like his self-portraits, La promesse is less a biographical painting than one concerned with the act of fashioning identity itself. Ye would have had his photograph taken at a studio, a context which Tabouret references by keeping the curtain void of ornamentation and preserving the sharp division between background and floor. Tabouret not only invokes the history of self-presentation but, by using a photograph as her source image, demonstrates the ways in which an identity is always mediated by external forces. La promesse, as such, is a painting about the ambiguous act of image-making.
Born in Pertuis, France, Tabouret’s initial encounters with art history came in the form of printed images and, later, visits to the Musée Fabre in Montpellier. As a young artist, she drew inspiration from French history, particularly its nineteenth-century painters including Gustave Courbet, Frédéric Bazille, Berthe Morisot and Édouard Manet; both the tonalities and sumptuous brushwork of her paintings speak to this past. With its protagonist in front of a neutral backdrop, La promesse is particularly reminiscent of Manet’s portraits of actors, matadors and musicians, which depict his subjects within an undefined expanse. Certainly, with his upright stature and commanding stare, Ye would have been a fitting sitter for Manet. Like his self-portraits, La promesse is less a biographical painting than one concerned with the act of fashioning identity itself. Ye would have had his photograph taken at a studio, a context which Tabouret references by keeping the curtain void of ornamentation and preserving the sharp division between background and floor. Tabouret not only invokes the history of self-presentation but, by using a photograph as her source image, demonstrates the ways in which an identity is always mediated by external forces. La promesse, as such, is a painting about the ambiguous act of image-making.