La Source; and The Triumph of Bacchus

Charles Natoire was François Boucher’s only true rival as a painter of erotic mythologies and the female nude in the middle decades of the eighteenth century in France. Universally recognized by the early 1730s as the two preeminent history painters among a generation of gifted practitioners, Natoire and Boucher followed remarkably similar career trajectories until the later 1740s, when the favor of Madame de Pompadour and her faction elevated Boucher’s career into ascendancy. Close in age, both artists trained in Paris with Louis Galloche and François Lemoyne, won the Prix de Rome and studied in the Eternal City, were received into the Academy in 1734 and made associate professors there on the same day, 2 July 1735. Natoire’s mature works – like those of Boucher – were deeply influenced by the example of Lemoyne, whose luminous and sensuous manner, dynamic compositions and bright, light palette they reflected and enhanced.

Upon Natoire’s return to Paris in 1730, he was showered with prestigious private and crown commissions, including series of decorative paintings derived from classical mythology and literary sources; he contributed decorative canvases to the royal chateaux of Versailles, Fontainebleau and Marly, and the Bibliothèque du Roi. Natoire’s greatest and most impressive secular commission is his series of eight panels illustrating the ‘Story of Psyche’ for the Salon ovale de la princesse at the Hôtel de Soubise, Paris, executed between 1736 and 1739. Elegant and highly colored, the compositions are filled with graceful women whose supple flesh and long limbs curve ingeniously to reflect Germain Boffrand’s elaborate boiseries. Still fully intact, the salon of the Hôtel de Soubise (which now houses the French National Archives) survives as perhaps the most splendid masterpiece of French Rococo decoration.

The present pair of Bacchanals – measuring over 7 feet-high, they are among the grandest works by Natoire still in private hands – dates from the very years when the artist was working in the Hôtel de Soubise, the peak moment of his genius. ‘La Source’ depicts a languorous but smiling water nymph who pours water from a clay urn into a huge seashell that rests on an embankment. Below the shell, two putti play on the back of a dolphin; another putto mischievously pulls away the nymph’s filmy drapery to reveal her nudity. Behind her, a muscular triton sounds his conch shell as a second, blonde nymph looks on. Looming reeds enclose a watery and verdant landscape setting. The painting is signed ‘C. NATOIRE’ and dated ‘1736’.

Natoire exhibited ‘La Source’ in the Louvre shortly after completing it. Although the Acadèmie Royale had suspended its annual Salons between 1725 and 1736, the academicians organized a small, unofficial exhibition in the Louvre that July. A review of the summer display, published in the Mercure de France, described the picture: 'M. Natoire exhibited a painting depicting a fountain under the guise of a Naiad accompanied by a Triton and by two little Children paired, with a Dolphin.' The anonymous critic further observed that it was 'intended as a decoration for a sideboard [‘un Buffet’]'. Although Natoire surely painted such a vast canvas as part of a specific commission for an established collector, the review fails to cite the identity of its first owner. Despite its large scale and obvious importance, the earliest established provenance for the picture (and its pendant), is Armand Frédèric Ernest Nogaret (1734-1806), who was only a child when the pictures were painted. Ownership of ‘La Source’ and its companion is first recorded in the 1807 estate sale of Nogaret, former treasurer of Charles Philippe, Comte d’Artois (the future King Charles X), the brother of Louis XVI.

The official Salon was reestablished the following year, and in 1738 Natoire contributed The Triumph of Bacchus to the exhibition. Of identical size to ‘La Source’ and complementary in composition and subject matter, it is likely that The Triumph of Bacchus was underway but not completed in time to be displayed with its pendant two years earlier. Natoire’s God of Wine is a lithe young man draped in panther skin and crowned with the ivy wreath that is one of his traditional symbols. A flying putto pours wine into the golden cup that Bacchus lifts heavenward, as two bacchantes reach to embrace the god. At his feet lay a drunken Silenus, leader of the satyrs, and a naked putto who gobbles a bunch of grapes. The 1738 Salon livret identifies the painting as number 57 in the exhibition: 'A large upright Painting measuring eight feet high by four feet wide depicting a Bacchic subject in which an Infant pours a libation for Bacchus, accompanied by two Bacchantes and by Silenus.' (The slightly larger dimensions recorded in the livret undoubtedly reflect the measurements of the frame that contained the painting.)

Sensuous, cheerful, filled with charm and vitality, Natoire’s paintings are superbly drawn with impeccable academic precision, but executed with quick, shimmering brushstrokes and illuminated with gilded sunlight. Large, complex multi-figural compositions such as these would have required a whole raft of individual drawn figure studies, but only one has thus far been identified, a red and white chalk drawing for the figure of Bacchus (fig. 1); the Sarasota drawing is in reverse of the painted figure, suggesting that Natoire relied on a counterproof of the drawing in preparing his final composition.