JOSEPH VIVIEN(1657 - 1734) Portrait of Madeleine-Geneviève... - Lot 154 - Osenat

Lot 154
Go to lot
Estimation :
20000 - 30000 EUR
JOSEPH VIVIEN(1657 - 1734) Portrait of Madeleine-Geneviève... - Lot 154 - Osenat
JOSEPH VIVIEN(1657 - 1734) Portrait of Madeleine-Geneviève Guillieaumon née Dupuis (ca. 1675 - 1759) 1722 Pastel on paper mounted on canvas 79 x 64 cm Provenance: - Jean-François Guillieaumon (1672-1758), Paris. - His inventory after death, May 25, 1759, cited with four other pastels of the family. - Count and Countess de Ribes collection since at least 1964 (1) - Their sale, Paris, Sotheby's, 11 December 2019, lot 23. Related work During: Portrait of Jean-François Guillieaumon (1672-1758), dated 1722, pastel on paper, 82 x 64 cm, private collection (ill. 1). Engraved by Nicolas-Étienne Edelinck. At the Salon of 1699, the sculptor and painter Florent Le Comte admired the portrait of Jules-Hardouin Mansart engraved by Edelinck after a pastel by Joseph Vivien. So, when he took his pen to describe the works seen, he thought it necessary to dwell at length on the portraitist: "I must digress once more to show you to what degree Monsieur Vivien has pushed pastel painting, in the great subjects of historical portraits that he paints daily in this manner, in which he shows us the same grace, the same strength, the same naivety and delicacy that we find in the oil works of our great masters, and it could be said that France can boast of having the Vandick of the century for pastel painting in him. But where do you think he got his principles from? He drew them from oil painting, his May of the year 1698, and another painting of twelve feet or so wide by ten high, representing the family of Monsieur de Rhode, are convincing proofs. But to speak only of his Pastel, the Portraits that he was made in Brussels for his Electoral Highness of Bavaria, & whose success has earned him all the honors imaginable ...: this Prince to preserve his Portrait having taken care to have it covered with a glass 48 inches high, even wanted that this Painter painted himself to send this Portrait to the Grand Duke of Tuscany as a new ornament of his Gallery where all the Illustrious find their place (2). In a few words, Le Comte succeeded in summing up the originality of Vivien's talent, namely his training as a history painter and the quality of his pastels, capable of rivaling oil in the rendering of materials and the transcription of light and shade. Born in Lyon, Vivien was sent to the capital at a very young age by his father who had noticed his talent for painting. He studied at the Academy with François Bonnemer and won the second prize in Rome in 1678 with The Expulsion of Adam and Eve. Sources are lacking to trace his career, but he seems to have worked with Charles Le Brun and was sufficiently well established and famous that the Paris Goldsmiths' Guild commissioned him to paint a May in 1697, which has yet to be identified. By this time, however, the artist had already turned to portraiture, especially pastel portraiture, a difficult technique that had been little practiced since the death of Robert Nanteuil in 1678. Soon, his mastery of the medium was such that it became possible for him to paint models from the front, to render all the subtlety of the flesh and fabrics, but also to create life-size and full-length portraits. As his reputation as a "painter of watermelon portraits" grew, Vivien was commissioned as early as 1696 by the Bâtiments du roi - the exact nature of the commission is unknown - and as early as 1698 by the Elector Maximilian Emmanuel of Bavaria, governor of the Spanish Netherlands, who commissioned the pastelist in Brussels and made him his official portraitist. He was admitted to the Academy in 1698 and received three years later upon presentation of portraits by Girardon and Robert de Cotte. The delivery of the works requested by the academicians was delayed by the number of requests he received from all sides, including the one in 1699 to paint the portraits of the Grand Dauphin, brother-in-law of the Duke of Bavaria, and his family (ill. 2). At the Salon of 1704, Vivien presented no less than twenty-four pastels, including the spectacular ones of the elector and his favorite, but also the more modest ones of his fellow artists and their wives. Created in 1722, our beautiful work is one of those portraits of the artist's relatives who preferred free and elegant attire to voluminous wigs and gleaming armor. These portraits, often in pendant, were both intimate and official, especially since some of them were published by engraving. It is precisely one of Vivien's regular engravers, Nicolas Edelinck, who makes the link between the model of our pastel and the artist. It is Madeleine-Geneviève Dupuis who married Jean-François Guillieaumon, master upholsterer of the city of Paris, of the clergy of France and of the University, established in rue Saint-Jacques. Daughter of Marie Mariette (great-aunt of the collector Pierre-Jean Mariette), she was the sister of Grégoire Dupuis.
My orders
Sale information
Sales conditions
Return to catalogue