ECOLE FRANÇAISE DU XIXE SIÈCLE

Lot 84
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Estimation :
20000 - 30000 EUR
Result with fees
Result : 40 300EUR
ECOLE FRANÇAISE DU XIXE SIÈCLE
Portrait of Caroline Murat, queen of Naples Oil on canvas 54,5 x 45, 8 cm Portrait of Caroline Murat, queen of Napoli Oil on canvas, 21,5 x 18 in. PROVENANCE Private collection BIBLIOGRAPHY Maria Teresa Caracciolo, The Sisters of Napoleon. Three Italian Fates, Paris, Hazan, 2013. Florence de Baudus, Caroline Bonaparte, Sister of the Emperor, Queen of Naples, Paris, Perrin, 2014. Among the many portraits of Caroline Bonaparte (1782-1839), Napoleon's younger sister, the paintings executed by François-Pascal Simon Gérard with his studio occupy a special place. And this work is the most striking example of this. The artist, considered in his time as "the painter of kings, the king of painters", presents, with the help of his disciples, the young woman in a bust, three-quarters to the right. Dressed in a white dress with gold embroidery with a sky-blue support band, with sleeves topped with lace, she has an evasive gaze and perfectly drawn lips. She wears an antique style hairdo with an oriental-style tiara topped with ostrich feathers, and a set of pearls around her neck and in earrings. The painting is reminiscent of the court portraits of the Ancien Régime, but includes a number of graphic and stylistic innovations. Starting with the freshness of the strokes, the neoclassical character of the brushstroke treatment and the return to a certain sfumato as a background. Here, there is no landscape or openness: only personality is valued, in the vein initiated by Gérard's master, the former conventionalist who became the Emperor Napoleon's first painter, Jacques-Louis David (1748 -1825). Compared to the other versions of the same model proposed by the artist, and without attempting a comparison with the large full-length portrait of Caroline with her four children (fig. 1) (original preserved at Fontainebleau and replica at Versailles) or even with that in the former Frédéric Masson collection (fig. 2) (Paris, Th EMP2021
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