Exhibitions in Parisian galleries (2)

28/3/25 - Art market - Paris - No doubt the dealers could make a typology of the many graphic arts enthusiasts who are strolling the streets of Paris at the end of March: there are the compulsive buyers, the undecided, the jack-of-all-trades, the monomaniacs... Around the Palais Brongniart, where the Salon du Dessin is held (article on line by one hour), several French and foreign galleries have set up temporarily to exhibit a selection of drawings. In the Passage Verdeau, Chantal Kiener takes her usual delighted look at little-known artists who require research and hold surprises. After Louis-Nicolas Cabat, Georges Dorignac and Henry Cros, she focuses on Papety and Bracquemond.

1. Dominique Papety (1815-1849)
Man’s Back Study, c. 1846
Graphite pencil, 36.3 x 25 cm
Galerie Chantal Kiener
Photo: Galerie Chantal Kiener

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Dominique Papety died at the age of 34, before he had had time to establish his reputation. Originally from Marseille, he trained in Paris under Léon Cogniet, won the Prix de Rome in 1836 with The Striking of the Rock and allowed himself to be seduced by the painting of Ingres, then director of the Villa Medici. A powerful study of a man seen from behind (ill. 1) is preparatory to one of the characters surrounding the Virgin in a painting entitled Consolatrix Afflictorum. On the right, in fact, a shirtless man with a dagger at his belt is dragging a young woman in tears away from the canvas. The painting, now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseille, was exhibited at the Salon of 1846 and considered a counterpart to Ary Scheffer’s Christ the Consoler. The critics gave a rather cool reception to this Consoler of the Afflicted who, according to Champfleury, “distresses us without consoling us”. Papety is also the author of small Italian landscapes translated in watercolor and presented in the gallery alongside the works of other traveling artists such as Felix Lionnet and Eugène Farochon.