Desmarais in Versailles, Amiens and Ajaccio

22/8/24 - Acquisitions and restoration - Versailles, Ajaccio and Amiens - How could we fail to see it as the artist’s masterpiece? In June, the sale in Paris (see the news item of 18/6/24) of the portrait of the sculptor Antoine-Denis Chaudet by Jean-Baptiste Frédéric Desmarais (ill. 1) did not fail to arouse covetousness. Sold for €130,000 excluding costs, i.e. €156,000 in all, it was immediately preempted by the emissary from the Château de Versailles, where we hope to be able to admire it soon, provided it is not hung on the picture rails of the attiques, unfortunately virtually inaccessible to the public [1].

1. Jean-Baptiste Frédéric Desmarais (1756-1813)
Portrait of the Sculptor Antoine-Denis Chaudet, 1788
Oil on canvas - 98 x 74.2 cm
Versailles, Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et Trianon
Photo: Sotheby’s

See the image in its page

It was very pompously described by Sotheby’s as ‘a major rediscovery in the field of late 18th-century French portraiture’, which makes one smile when one considers that the painting was illustrated on a full page as early as 2002 in Colin B. Bailey’s seminal work, Patriotic Taste of France. Bailey, Patriotic Taste. Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris and then shown in the exhibition ‘Portraits publics, portraits privés. 1770-1830’ between 2006 and 2007 (see article). An attractive testimony to the Roman years of the two artists, the painting first portrays Chaudet as a fashionable young man, in a posture that is both inspired and melancholy. Dressed in an elegant frock coat with large gold buttons encircling a precious white tie, the sculptor gazes pensively at the small group of Friendship Chaining Love that he was to complete in August 1788, during the last year of his stay at the Académie de France in Rome. His director François Guillaume Ménageot mentioned it in a letter to the Comte d’Angiviller: ‘Sr Chaudet has just finished a small figure of Friendship which has given me great…