JEAN BARBAULT (VIARMES, NEAR CHANTILLY 1718-1762 ROME)
JEAN BARBAULT (VIARMES, NEAR CHANTILLY 1718-1762 ROME)
JEAN BARBAULT (VIARMES, NEAR CHANTILLY 1718-1762 ROME)
6 更多
JEAN BARBAULT (VIARMES, NEAR CHANTILLY 1718-1762 ROME)
9 更多
JEAN BARBAULT (VIARMES, NEAR CHANTILLY 1718-1762 ROME)

A pastoral scene with a boy offering a shepherdess doves in a rocky landscape; and A pastoral scene with two musicians serenading a shepherdess

細節
JEAN BARBAULT (VIARMES, NEAR CHANTILLY 1718-1762 ROME)
A pastoral scene with a boy offering a shepherdess doves in a rocky landscape; and A pastoral scene with two musicians serenading a shepherdess
oil on canvas
53 ¼ x 38 ¾ in. (135.3 x 98.4 cm.), each
a pair
來源
Oskar Guhl (1870-1937), Zürich; Galerie Fischer, Lucerne, 26 August-3 September 1938, lot 1630 a/b, as Huet, where jointly acquired by,
Galerie Fischer and A. Seligmann.
Hilda Boldt Weber (1885-1951), Santa Barbara, CA, by 1941, and from whom acquired in 1949 by,
Conrad Nicholson Hilton (1887-1979), Bel Air, CA, and by descent to,
Barron Hilton (1927-2019), Bel Air, CA, from whose estate acquired by the present owner.



拍場告示
This Lot is Withdrawn.

榮譽呈獻

Jonquil O’Reilly
Jonquil O’Reilly Vice President, Specialist, Head of Sale

拍品專文

Among the many French painters who made careers for themselves in Italy in the middle of the eighteenth century, Jean Barbault was one of the most agreeable and original. Born in 1718 in a village in the Ile-de-France, Barbault’s life prior to his arrival in Rome in 1747 is unrecorded, apart from his having apprenticed as a painter with Jean Restout in Paris, and competed unsuccessfully for the Prix de Rome in 1745. He seems to have travelled to Italy at his own expense and supported himself by working as an engraver. (He executed more than 500 prints throughout his life, some quite celebrated, and many in the style of Piranese, with whom he collaborated.) Despite his unheralded arrival in the city, he was quickly taken up by Jean-François de Troy, the influential Director of the French Academy in Rome, who gave the artist his first important commission. An ‘Oriental’ theme had been chosen by the Academy for its annual Carnival in 1748, and De Troy asked Barbault to memorialize the event in twenty, small-scale, full-length oil sketches of the young pensonnaires in their extravagant masquerade costumes. Like the participating students who assumed fantastical ‘Turkish’ dress, Barbault himself went as an Officer of the Sultan’s Guard. The series of witty and imaginative paintings was widely admired – Barbault would replicate many of the individual canvases for the market – and he was rewarded with admission to the Academy as a pensionnaire in the autumn of 1749.

His reputation quickly established with the ‘Turkish Carnival’ series, Barbault found success as a painter during his first years in Rome, based mainly on the sale of paintings of costumed figures, usually in colorful local or regional Italian dress. Subjects such as ‘La Vénitienne’, the ‘Peasant Woman of Frascati’ and the ‘Young Woman in Neapolitan Fashion’, found such favor that he frequently repeated them in multiple versions to meet demand. Sets of them were sought after by distinguished collectors such as the Marquis de Marigny, Madame de Pompadour’s younger brother, who acquired a series of Barbault’s costume pieces in 1750 when he visited Rome on his Grand Tour.

The present pair of charming pastoral decorations have only recently been recognized as works by Barbault, although they are entirely characteristic of his hand, if larger in size and more ambitious in design than most of his paintings. For much of the twentieth century they have sheltered under a misattribution to Jean-Baptiste Huet (1745-1811), a specialist in pastoral genre scenes in the manner of François Boucher. Beautifully preserved and deftly, fluidly executed, the paintings display the creamy brushwork, airy atmosphere, evocative Italianate setting and seductive coloration that is typical of Barbault’s finest works of the 1750s. The attribution of the present paintings to Barbault can be confirmed by the close correlation between the kneeling boy who presents a pair of doves to his reclining sweetheart in one of the pendants, to an almost identical couple who appears in one of a pair of small oil sketches by Barbault that was formerly in the Champalimaud collection (sold, Christie’s, London, 6 July 2005, lot 30), paintings which themselves had long been attributed to Huet, and subsequently to Louis-Joseph Le Lorrain (1715-1759). The attribution to Barbault of the ex-Champalimaud pictures was made by Nicolas Lesur based on their direct relationship to two preliminary black chalk drawings for the sketches that are signed ‘Barbot’ in the Wallraf-Richatz Museum, Cologne. (For the Champalimaud paintings and the related drawings in Cologne, see N. Lesur in the exhibition catalogue Jean Barbault, 1718-1762: Le théâtre de la vie italienne, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg, 2010, p. 148, nos. 60 and 61).

For much of the twentieth century, Barbault’s paintings decorated the drawing room of ‘Casa Encantada’, an opulent 60-room mansion at 10644 Bellagio Road in Bel Air (Los Angeles) designed in 1939 by T. J. Robsjohn-Gibbings (business partner of Charles Duveen) for Mrs. Hilda Boldt Weber (fig. 1 and fig. 2). Mrs. Weber sold the house, fully furnished, in 1950 to Conrad Hilton, the hotel magnate, who described it as 'one of the fabulous houses of the world'. Since Hilton’s death in 1979, the paintings have remained the property of his heirs.

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