CELEBRATING THE SCIENCES IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT: THE PORTRAIT OF THE LAVOISIER COUPLE
Known from our history, physics, and chemistry textbooks, the portrait of the Lavoisier couple by Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) has been transmitted to us as emblematic of the Age of Enlightenment. Incarnating a new form of modernity that began throughout the 18th century, symptomatic of the upheavals to come, the work was excluded from the 1789 Salon for its almost subversive character. In a monumental format where he adopted the codes of a staging reserved until then for the nobility and aristocracy for an intellectual couple, David anticipated the profound social changes already underway.
This first version, now housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is poorly documented regarding the origins and context of its commission, except that the painter received payment for the work at the end of 1788.
Workshop of Jacques-Louis DAVID
Paris, 1748 - 1825, Brussels
Portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) and his wife, Marie-Anne-Pierrette Paulze (1758-1836)
Oil on canvas mounted on panel 109.5 x 83.2 cm
PROVENANCE
Jacques Ramey de Sugny (1829-1909), probably given by his great-aunt Marie-Anne-Pierrette Lavoisier (1758-1836), then by descent to the present day.
Transmitted within the descendants of Marie-Anne Lavoisier, the technical quality of this rediscovered second version, its almost perfect resemblance to the model, the underlying presence of a grid, and the prolific activity of the important workshop that David directed invite us to see the work of a student. The composition pleased enough for a smaller-sized replica to be executed, a testimony at the same time to the painter's trust in one of his students.
Chemist, economist, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier is now seen as the inventor of modern chemistry. If he was a pioneer in research on oxygen, gunpowder, and the chemical composition of water, he also rethought how science should be theorized and explained. In 1789, he published his most famous and probably most comprehensive work, "Traité élémentaire de chimie" (Elementary Treatise on Chemistry). In the preliminary discourse, he states, "We cannot improve language without improving science, nor science without language, and however certain the facts, however just the ideas they would have given rise to, they would still only convey false impressions if we did not have exact expressions to render them." He is one of the first to highlight the gap between what is commonly said and what is newly known. Visionary, he knows that a new scientific language must be created to serve the discoveries whose pace is intensifying.
Alongside him, Marie-Anne Pierrette Lavoisier, born Paulze, was a valuable collaborator. By translating foreign works into French, illustrating the Treatise (a portfolio of drawings is on the background armchair), and publishing her husband's unpublished writings posthumously, including his unfinished memoirs, she actively participated in the development and dissemination of a lifetime's work.
This is how David ultimately chose to represent them. A study and restoration campaign conducted by the Department of Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum has highlighted an underlying composition entirely different from the one we know, replicated here. Originally, the artist had imagined a more bourgeois, luxurious interior: in front of a library, few scientific instruments, a simple wicker basket at the foot of a neoclassical desk adorned with a gilded bronze frieze. Madame Lavoisier, on the other hand, sported a more extravagant outfit, including a hat with a tarare, a wide headgear with feathers and ribbons. This first version was more in line with Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier's other activity, that of a farmer-general, a function that allowed him to perpetuate rents and social status. Although he worked for a time for the Revolutionary Tribunal, it did not save him from the guillotine in 1794 following a political scandal.
OLD MASTERS
Auction March 28, 2023 Aguttes Neuilly
Director and expert of the Old Paintings & Drawings department
Grégoire Lacroix
+33 1 47 45 08 19 • lacroix@aguttes.com