1715 - Paris - Amsterdam - 1783
Portrait of Pierre, Joseph-Antoine, or Louis-François Crozat, Marquis du Chatel
Oil on Canvas, 81.5 x 65.4 cm ( 32( x 25( inches)
Provenance
Count de Saint Charbrais
Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza by 1930
Exhibited
Munich 1930 (as Watteau)
Lausanne 1986 (as Watteau)
Notes:
Perronneau studied engraving with Laurent Cars and then painting with Natoire. He was accepted by the Academie Royale in 1746 and became a full member 1753. But his rivalry with the pastellist Quentin de La Tour led him to seek a clientele outside Paris, especially it seems in Orléans, but also in Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon and in Turin, Rome and Amsterdam. Less popular with the high aristocracy than La Tour, he painted mostly the senior Officials, and the upper bourgeoisie, engineers, doctors and clergy. On the other hand he seems to have been particularly favoured and respected by his own colleagues, and painted portraits of Gilequian, Drouais and Oudry and of the engravers Cars and Huquier, the sculptor Adam the elder, the architects Chevotet, & Soyer. His strong firm almost coarse (and maybe rather less flattering) style may have been appreciated better by these connoisseurs than the slightly slicker and more perfectionist style of La Tour, who seems to have gone out of his way to sabotage the career of this younger artist. Fashionable critics also objected to the fact that his style varied considerably and became more and more sober and restrained. The Soyer portrait (see below) was particularly cited in this respect.
Despite the high quality, the old attribution to Watteau, borne by this fine portrait since 1930 while it was in the Thyssen collection, is no longer tenable. Although Perronneau often worked in pastel and the comparison of an oil painting with a pastel can be misleading, the similarities are here so striking as to leave no room for doubt. Fortunately enough works in oil are also known among which, from the group of thirteen portraits in the Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Orléans the closest are the Portrait of Robert Soyer (1) and of Daniel Jousse (2). Among the pastels the closest are the portraits of MM. Chevotet, Drouais, & Raquenet. One can also compare the painting of the Landgraf von Hesse at Ann Arbor and M.& Mme. Braun in S. Francisco "The personal sense of realism in Perronneau's work is combined with a need to serve and understand the sitter, in contrast to La Tour, who used his sitters to his own advantage" (3) - here, in an oil painting, the everlasting contrast with La Tour is anyway irrelevant.
Biographical Note:
Known only as a 'Portrait of Crozat' it is not clear whether the sitter is the collector Joseph Antoine Crozat (1696 - 1751) or Louis Francois Crozat (1691- 1750), Marquis de Chatel et de Moy, General of the French Army who served under Prince Eugene against the Turks and in campaigns in Spain, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. In fact both were nephews of the more important collector Pierre Crozat, who died in 1740 at the age of 75 years.
The absence of any military attribute seems to rule out de Chatel, and 1740 is probably, though not in fact neccessarily, rather early for Perronneau, who would have been 25 years old and not yet in the Academie. But he was certainly working and the sitter looks older, whereas Antoine was only 55 when he died (but that was quite old at the time). Pierre (possibly) or Antoine (more probably): Perronneau's most comparable dated portraits are in the 50's and 60's but an earlier work is more likely to have been unsigned. It cannot be ruled out.
Bibliography
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