Jacques Louis David

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France ( 1748 - 1825 ) - Artworks Wikipedia® - Jacques Louis David

DAVID Jacques Louis Alexander Ordering The Books Of Homer To Be Preserved

Auction House:
Christie's / Jan 26, 2012
Estimate:€11,584.80 - €15,446.40
Price:€33,280.63

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Jacques Louis David

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Artworks in Arcadja

181

Some works of Jacques Louis David

Extracted between 181 works in the catalog of Arcadja

Jacques Louis David - Portrait Of Mademoiselle Guimard As Terpsichore

Original

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Price:

Auction: Christie's - Jun 5, 2013- New York

Lot number: 41
Other WORKS AT AUCTIONDescription:

Jacques-Louis David (Paris 1748-1825 Brussels) Portrait of Mademoiselle Guimard as Terpsichore oil on canvas 77 x 47 in. (195.5 x 120.5 cm.) Commissioned by the sitter from David between 1773 and 1775. Presumably with David in 1799 (see note below). Anonymous sale; Paris, 30 November 1826, lot 3. Camille Groult, Paris, 1889 (as Fragonard). M. Ortiz Linares, Paris and Geneva. Graziella Patino de Ortiz-Linares; (+), Sotheby's, London, 8 July 1987, lot 92. Meister in Correspondance littéraire, March 1773 (ed. M. Tourneux as Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique par Grimm, Diderot, Raynal, Meister, etc., X, Paris, 1879, pp. 210-211). M. Miette de Villars, Mémoires de David, peintre et député à la Convention, Paris, 1850, pp. 62, 63. E. J. Delécluze, Louis David, son école et son temps: souvenirs, Paris, 1855, pp. 110-111. R. Portalis, Honoré Fragonard, sa vie, son oeuvre, Paris, 1889, pp. 88, 89, 134. V. Josz, Fragonard, moeurs du XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 1901, pp. 181-182. V. Josz, L'Art français au XVIIIe siècle, exhibition catalogue, Brussels, 1904, p. 56. C. Mauclair, Fragonard, Paris, 1904, p. 37. L. de Fourcaud, 'Honoré Fragonard', Revue de l'Art Ancien et Moderne, XXI, January-June 1907, p. 224. A. Dayot and L. Vaillat, 'Fragonard', L'Art et les Artistes, 27, June-July 1907, p. 156. E. and J. de Goncourt, L'art du XVIIIe siècle, ed. 1914, Paris, pp. 283, 313 (as Fragonard). P. de Nolhac, Fragonard, Paris, 1918, pp. 72-73. P. Rosenberg, Fragonard, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1987, p. 298. A. Sérullaz, Jacques-Louis David: 1748-1825, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1989, pp. 41, 50, fig. 24 bis (as attributed to David and Fragonard). P. Rosenberg, Tout l'Oeuvre Peint de Fragonard, Paris, 1989, p. 95, no. 217 (as David and Fragonard). S. Lee, David, London, 1999, p. 29, fig. 21. C.B. Bailey, Fragonard's Progress of Love at The Frick Collection, New York & London, 2011, pp. 49, 166, note 60, fig. 32. The genesis of this spirited, life-sized, full-length portrait of the celebrated dancer and courtesan Marie-Madeleine Guimard (1743-1816) involved two of the greatest painters in the history of French art, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Jacques-Louis David, although the precise nature and extent of their participation in its creation has long been the subject of confusion. The sitter, Mlle Guimard, made her debut at the Comédie Française, but soon thereafter joined the Paris Opéra, where she remained a star for several decades, acquiring well-placed lovers and considerable wealth along the way. Among her first notable roles was that of Terpsichore, Muse of Dance, in Les Fêtes greques et romaines (1762). In 1770, the 27-year-old Guimard commissioned the architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux to build for her a hôtel in the Chaussée d'Antin, in the newly fashionable section of Paris north of the Seine near the present-day Gare Saint-Lazare; the house was to be a Temple of Terpsichore with its own theatre attached, built in the latest and most avant-garde neoclassical style. Fragonard was commissioned to paint a series of four large mythological panels for the Salon de Compagnie. The residence was completed only in 1773, with Guimard forced to wait as Fragonard, Ledoux and his équipe of masons, carpenters and wood carvers devoted themselves to fulfilling the urgent demands of a more powerful client, the comtesse du Barry -- official mistress of Louis XV -- whose pavilion in Louveciennes was commissioned second, but the construction and decoration of which would take precedence. By the time Guimard's residence was inaugurated, she and Fragonard had had a spectacular falling out, with the dancer having dismissed him from the project, and the artist having only sketched in the designs for the four wall panels. The Correspondance Littéraire carried news of the scandal in March 1773, reporting that "the hôtel of Mlle Guimard is almost finished; if it was paid for by Amor, it was designed by Volupté, and this divinity never had a temple in Greece more worthy of her cult. The salon is full of paintings; Mlle Guimard is represented as Terpsichore, with all the attributes that could characterize her in the most appealing way. These paintings were not yet finished when, for some reason, she had a quarrel with her painter, M. Fragonard; the quarrel was so considerable that he was dismissed, and another painter had to be called upon." The 'other painter' was the little-known, 25-year-old Louis David, a student at the École des Élèves Protégés; his first important commission would therefore consist of finishing the four mythological panels for La Guimard's salon and composing a ceiling for the room. Eight months later, in November 1773, J-B-M Pierre, First Painter to the King, weighed in on the dispute between artist and patron, defending David in a letter to Ledoux. Pierre noted that David was blameless in the matter, and that Guimard had dismissed Fragonard when the artist, having agreed "to do the work for 6,000 livres, and having laid in the compositions demanded 20,000 livres and four years for completion, and that, frightened by this last sum, Mlle Guimard renounced her project, relieved to have to pay only the 100 louis [2400 livres] that she had already dispersed to M. Fragonard, who, for his part, either out of negligence or design, left the salon unfinished." Fragonard then departed for Italy in the company of Bergeret de Grandcourt, and Guimard brought in David to complete the project. No trace survives of the decorations made for Guimard. Her house was aquired in 1786, following her bankrupcy, by the banker J-F Perregaux and Louis Hautecoeur (1954) mentions that in that year David slightly repainted his decorative panels. Removed from their setting, the four large, almost square panels were sold as a group in Paris, 21-22 December 1846, where they were mistakenly attributed to Fragonard alone; they subsequently disappeared. David's ceiling is also unknown today, although it is the only part of the decorations for Guimard recorded by David in the list he made of his works. However, David's earliest biographer, Miette de Villars, mentioned in his account of the artist's career (1850), that David had also "made a portrait of the lady [Guimard] representing her as a Shepherdess in the costume of the time," an apparent reference to the present canvas. A more detailed description of the present work appears in the unimpeachable memoir of David by his pupil, Étienne Delécluze, which was published in 1855 but serialized in articles beginning soon after David's death in the 1820s. Noting that David was employed to complete the decorations for Guimard that Fragonard had originally "sketched in," Delécluze went on to observe that it was "during the time of this work, that he [David] also made a portrait of Mlle Guimard, whose generosity to the young artist was as noble as it was delicate." He recounts that 'in 1799' David showed him the portrait, 'executed completely in the taste of Boucher,' remembering that David said that "the sight of this work was always doubly agreeable to him because it reminded him of a truly generous Protector, and gave him an irrefutable proof of the reform that he had introduced into art." The passage is notable for several reasons. It suggests that the portrait was in David's possession by 1799 (probably acquired after Guimard went bankrupt in 1786), and that it was executed in an antiquated, rococo style that the artist would soon overthrow for a neoclassical idiom that would revolutionize painting; beyond that, it describes the picture as 'completely in the taste of Boucher' while in no way indicating that it owed any debt to Fragonard. When the present painting first appeared at auction in Paris on 30 September 1826 (lot 3) -- just one year after David's death in exile in Brussels -- it was identified as the portrait of Guimard by David, the catalogue noting that this 'curious' painting was painted in "une manière absolvment opposéo à celle que le grand maître à prise lorsqu'il a eu l'idée de régénerer l'ecole...." However, by the late 19th century, when it was in the legendary collection of Camille Groult, it was considered one of the masterpieces of Fragonard, lovingly evoked by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, after which time it disappeared from view. After it reappeared at auction in London in 1987, from the Patino collection, several scholars tentatively suggested that it might have been executed by both David and Fragonard, like the lost salon decorations of Mlle Guimard, perhaps begun by Fragonard and finished by the younger artist. However, little about the picture's appearance or the contemporary references to it recommends this theory. Miette de Villars and Delécluze -- both of whom knew David -- discuss it as a work by David with no suggestion that Fragonard had any part in its creation. It was attributed to David alone when it was sold in 1826. No early source refers to Fragonard as designing anything for Guimard beyond the four lost mythologies. The handling of paint is entirely consistent throughout the portrait, with nothing to suggest that more than one hand was involved in its execution. Moreover, the portrait is designed and painted with an appealing naïveté, pastel palette, and rococo energy consistent with the earliest paintings of David, such as the portraits of his uncle, François Buron (private collection) and aunt, Marie-Josèphe Buron (Art Institute of Chicago), which are signed and dated 1769; his Grand Prix submission of 1771, The Combat of Mars and Minerva (Louvre, Paris); and his competition piece of 1774, Antiochus and Stratonice (École des Beaux-Arts, Paris). Fragonard, on the other hand, was at the height of his powers in 1773-1774, having just completed his series for the comtesse du Barry's pleasure pavilion at Louveciennes, the famous Progress of Love (1772; The Frick Collection, New York), the greatest decorative ensemble produced in France in the 18th century. His style at this point in his career has little to do with the Boucher-inflected manner of the Portrait of Mlle Guimard as Terpsichore. Although the Goncourt mistakenly attributed the painting to Fragonard, their appreciation of it is apropos: "wearing the costume of a shepherdess from the Opéra, [her] powdered hair is crowned by a light garden hat, in a charming turned-up style with ribbons fluttering out behind it; and a pug is barking up her skirt.... Shown in the act of trying out a dance step, the ballerina is shod with white satin shoes adorned with pink rosettes -- charming shoes worn by a triumphant foot which provides the target for a cupid kneeling in a rose-bush and preparing to discharge an arrow from his bow." The discovery, just last year, of a previously unknown drawing by Fragonard recording many of his figures de fantaisie and bearing hand-written identifications of their subjects has upended the long-held belief that one of his beloved 'Fantasy Portraits' in the Louvre portrayed La Guimard (it depicts instead the daughter of the marquis de Grave, Marie-Anne-Éléonore de Grave; see C. Blumenfeld, Une facétie de Fragonard: Les révélations d'un dessin retrouvé, Paris, 2013, pp. 22-23). Likewise, recent scholarship has further diminished the painted ties of Fragonard to Guimard, firmly asserting the authorship of the present portrait to David rather than Fragonard, notably in a study of David by Simon Lee (1999), and especially in Colin B. Bailey's definitive examination of Fragonard's Progress of Love cycle (2011), in which the author observes that the present painting, having recently appeared with an attribution to Fragonard and David jointly, "would appear to have been painted entirely by the twenty-five year old David" (p. 166, note 60). A reasoned examination of The Portrait of Mademoiselle Guimard as Terpsichore reveals that it is unlikely to be merely a curious hybrid by two hands belonging to painters of different eras and sensibilities. More profitable than attempting to incorporate it awkwardly into the mature career of Fragonard, the last great painter of the ancién regime, would be to see the portrait as David and his contemporaries saw it: the sparkling debut of a transformative genius who was soon to reimagine the art of painting in Europe for a new century.

Jacques Louis David - The Goddess Athena Surrounded By Vestal Virgins And Attacked By Warriors

Original

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Auction: Palais Dorotheum - Apr 24, 2013- Vienne

Lot number: 153
Other WORKS AT AUCTIONDescription:

Jacques-Louis David (Paris 1748-1825 Brussels) The Goddess Athena surrounded by Vestal virgins and attacked by warriors, design for an antique frieze, pen and grey ink, on prepared transparent paper, 20,5 x 40,5 cm, mounted, framed, (Sch) Since 1766 Jacques-Louis David was a collaborator in the studio of Joseph-Marie Vien (Montpellier 1716-1809 Paris). In 1774 he was awarded the Prix de Rome for the painting „Erasistratos discovering the illness of Antiochus“; shortly afterwards he and Vien left to Italy, where David stayed until 1780. He participated regularly at the salon which made him quite famous; in 1783 he became a member of Academie des Beaux-Arts. Subsequently he directed his interest towards Greek antiquity. He became friends with the archeologist Antoine Quatremère de Quincy, studied the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and visited the Herculaneum and Pompej. The present two drawings bear large resemblances with several sheets from David’’’’s „Twelve Roman albums“, which he executed on the occasion of a sojourn during his first two journeys to Italy around 1780. The studies prove his interest in archeology and antiquity: the figures in the frieze are variants of motifs on Greek vases, which David had studied in the publication "Antiquités etrusques, grecques et romaines" (1766-1767) by Baron d'Hancarville. Literature: Jean-Jacques Lévêque, Jacques-Louis David, ACR Edition, Paris 1989, p. 32 ff; Pierre Rosenberg/ Louis-Antoine Prat, Jacques-Louis David, 1748-1825: Catalogue raisonné des dessins, Leonardo Arte, Milan 2002, p. 583, sheet 21, No. 817: "Apollo and Ariadne surrounded by sartyrs and maenads."

Jacques Louis David - Study Of A Young Woman, Full Length, Seen In Profile, Wearing A Veil And Carrying A Muff

Original 1787

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Auction: Christie's - Dec 6, 2012- London

Lot number: 135
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Jacques-Louis David (Paris 1748-1825 Brussels) Study of a young woman, full length, seen in profile, wearing a veil and carrying a muff; and Another study of the same figure both signed and dated 'L. David. 1787.' black chalk 8 x 4½ in. (20.3 x 11.4 cm.) two drawings on one mount Provenance Anonymous sale; Christie's, 19 April 1988, lot 109. Phillips, London, 9 July 2001, lot 16. Literature P. Rosenberg and L.-A. Prat, Jacques-Louis David 1748-1825: Catalogue raisonné des dessins, Milan, 2002, vol. 1, nos. 10-11.

Jacques Louis David - Alexander Ordering The Books Of Homer To Be Preserved

Original

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Auction: Christie's - Jan 26, 2012- New York

Lot number: 122
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Jacques-Louis David (Paris 1748-1825 Brussels) Alexander ordering the books of Homer to be preserved (recto); Study of a triumphal procession with a subsidiary study of the figure of Alexander (verso) with inscription 'Vatican' (recto) black chalk, pen and black ink, grey wash (recto), black chalk, pen and brown ink (verso) 5 x 7½ in. (13 x 19 cm.) Eugène David (L. 838) and Jules David (L. 1437); by descent to Marquise de Ludre (the artist's great-great granddaughter); Galerie Charpentier, Paris, 15 March 1956, lot 11 (part of Album 10). with Gallery Jacques Seligmann, New York (cat. Master Drawings, 1960, no. 9). G. Seligman, New York (L. online 3863). Anonymous sale, Christie's, London, 12 December 1978, lot 126. with Chaucer Galleries, London, 1979 (cat. no. 18). Mr. and Mrs. Norman D. Hutchinson. Anonymous sale, Sotheby's, London, 10 July 2002, lot 224, where acquired by the present owner. PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN David et Rome, exhib. cat., Rome, Académie de France à Rome, 1981, p. 68, no. 19. P. Rosenberg and L.-A. Prat, Jacques-Louis David 1748-1825. Catalogue raisonné des dessins, Milan, 2002, I, no. 1023. Paris, Grand Palais, Raphael et l'art français, 1983, no. 61. This drawing, a copy after a fresco from Raphael's studio in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican, was originally part of David's Roman albums. Back from his long sojourn in Italy, David regrouped the drawings he had made there - mostly copies after the antique and the Masters - in two albums organized thematically (for the history and reconsctruction of the Roman albums, see Rosenberg and Prat, op. cit., I, pp. 391-406 and II, pp. 779-83). This drawing, was, for example, on page 105, in a section devoted to drawings of groups of figures. David used the albums during all his career as a source of inspiration. At David's death, his sons Jules and Eugène signed with their monograms each of the drawings and decided, undoubtedly for commercial reasons, to dismember the original albums and to reorganize all the pages in twelve new albums where the thematical order was broken. The present drawing ended up on page 2 of Album 10, which was itself dismembered in the 1950's. On the verso, David has made a larger a study, with a few differences, of the figure of Alexander from the composition copied on the recto. The artist later used it with differences (most importantly in the position of the head) for the figure of Alexander in his drawing of 1779, Alexander at the deathbed of the wife of Darius, now in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris (Rosenberg and Prat, op. cit, no. 30).

Jacques Louis David - Alexander, Apelles And Campaspe

Original

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Auction: Sotheby's - Jul 8, 2009- London

Lot number: 58
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LOT 58 JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID PARIS 1748 - 1825 BRUSSELS ALEXANDER, APELLES AND CAMPASPE 600,000—800,000 GBP DESCRIPTION Pen and black ink, grey and light beige wash heightened with white over black chalk; signed and dated in pen and black ink on the pedestal of the chair of Apelles: L. David. 1813 A dedicatory letter in pen and ink attached to the backing of the frame: Alexandre, Apelles et Campaspe./Par Louis David/1812. [sic] /J'ai l'honneur d'offrir à ma digne/Elève, Mademoiselle Léonie Dusseuil,/ce dessin d'un grand peintre, dont les/oeuvres sont un modèle de style, de goût/et de caractère./En appréciant/ces rares mérites,/Mademoiselle Léonie Saura y joindra/la grace, l'esquise delicatesse de l' esprit /et les nobles élans de l'âme, qui/distinguent son remarquable talent ./Aug.te Couder/élève de L. David./1er avril 1868. PROVENANCE Given by David to Antoine-Jean, Baron Gros (1771-1835) in February 1820, his sale, Paris, 23 November 1835, lot 172, to the painter, Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse (1784-1844), his sale, Paris, 19 March 1845, lot 29, to Charles-Auguste Couder (1790-1873); presented by him to his pupil Léonie Dusseuil (1843-1923) on 1 April 1868; Private Collection, France EXHIBITED Brussels, Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts, David et son temps, 1925-6, possibly no. 28 LITERATURE AND REFERENCES A. Th[omé de Gamond], Vie de David, Paris 1826, p. 167; Ch. Blanc, Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles, École française, vol. ll, 1865, p.16; J.L.J. David, Le peintre Louis David, 1748-1825. I. Souvenirs et documents inédits, 1880, pp. 569, 574, 662; M. Florisoone, David. Exposition en l'honneur du deuxième centenaire de sa naissance, exhib. cat., Paris, Orangerie des Tuileries, and Versailles, Musée du château,1948, under no. M.O.66 (1); L. Hautecoeur, Louis David, Paris 1954, p. 245; S.A. Nash, The Drawings of Jacques-Louis David: selected problems, PhD thesis, Stanford University, 1973, pp. 155-56, and p. 236, note 388; D. and G. Wildenstein, Documents complémentaires au catalogue de l'oeuvre de Louis David, Paris 1973, no. 1869; A. Brookner, Jacques-Louis David, London 1980, p. 210; A. Schnapper, Jacques-Louis David 1748-1825, exhib. cat., Paris, Musée du Louvre, and Versailles, Musée du château,1989-90, pp. 626-27; P. Spencer-Longhurst, 'Apelles painting Campaspe' by Jacques-Louis David: art, politics, and honour', in Apollo, CXXXV, no. 361, March 1992, pp. 157, 162, note 3; P. Rosenberg and L.-A. Prat, Jacques-Louis David 1748-1825, Catalogue raisonné des dessins, Milan 2002, vol. I, pp. 302-3, no. 319bis. reproduced; p. 712, under no. 1106; and vol. II, p. 1016, under no. 1566; p. 1218, under M6; V. Bajou and S. Lemeux-Fraitot, Inventaires après décès de Gros et de Girodet, Paris 2002, p. 57, no. 325; p.101, no. 325; P. Bordes, Review of Rosenberg and Prat, in Revue de l'Art, no. 143, 2004/1, p. 123; reproduced, p. 124, fig. 1; P. Bordes, Jacques-Louis David, Empire to Exile, exhib. cat., Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum and Williamstown, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2005, under cat. no. 31, pp.225-228, illus. p.227, fig. 79, CATALOGUE NOTE This very important drawing, long known only through the literature on David, reappeared in 2001. It was a gift from David to Baron Gros and is recorded in an exchange of letters between the two artists which was transcribed by Delahaye. On 22 February 1820, David wrote: 'Ma femme me fait part du plaisir que ferait à mon Cher Mr Gros la vue du dessin de moi représentant Alexandre faisant peindre par appel [sic] sa maitresse Campaspe, je saisis cette occasion pour le prier de l'accepter de ma part'. Baron Gros, in a reply of 4 August 1820, wrote in appreciation of the gift, saying that it constituted: 'la gemma de mon petit salon'.1 Bordes describes this elaborate and highly-finished drawing as 'among the artist's most ambitious graphic works'.2 It can be seen as an independent work, although somewhat later David began a painting of the same subject (fig. 1, Lille Musée des Beaux-Arts). The studio of Apelles is full of antique objects, which Rosenberg and Prat have shown to be based on the copies drawn by David on his Italian travels. For instance, the subject of the canvas which Apelles is painting is The Departure of Orestes and Iphigenia from Tauris, from a sketch David had made in 1780 after a relief on an antique sarcophagus in the Libreria Vecchia, Venice. Behind Campaspe is the famous bust of Achilles from the Giustiniani collection, now in the Torlonia museum (believed at the time to represent Alexander), and the Apollo Belvedere, which David copied circa 1805 when it was in Paris. The marble relief just behind the bust of Achilles, representing a soldier riding a horse, seems to be another classical quotation. The chairs and the lyre also have prototypes in David's sketchbooks.3 Bordes believes that this emphasis on antiquity is a reflection of David's intellectual concerns at the period. Although David may have begun the painting of this subject in Paris as early as 1813, at the time of his death in Brussels it was listed as an unfinished work. The setting is vastly simplified and there are significant differences between the two compositions, most notably that the painting on which Apelles is working is now, more logically, the portrait of Campaspe, with Alexander. Again, Bordes sees the changes as a reflection of the artist's aims at a slightly later period in his life. This drawing can be grouped with several others of classical subjects dated 1812 and 1813.4 All share the same media and are fully developed compositions, with authentic antique details deriving from David's studies. However, Alexander, Apelles and Campaspe is the most elaborate and impressive of them all, perhaps because the subject of an artist in his studio had a special resonance for David. It is, as Rosenberg and Prat described it, 'magnifique', an elegant summation of the artist's fascination with antiquity, and arguably the most important drawing by David that remains in private hands. 1. Rosenberg and Prat, loc. cit. 2. Bordes, op. cit., 2005, p.225 3. Rosenberg and Prat, loc. cit. 4. Rosenberg and Prat, op. cit., nos. 305, 306, 316, 319