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- 1. Marguerite Gérard (1761-1837)
A Young Woman who has just Received a Letter from her Husband. Her Father is looking on a Globe for the Distance from Which the Letter Came, 1808
Oil on canvas - 61 x 50.5 cm
Stockholm, Nationalmuseum
Photo: Artcurial - See the image in its page
7/6/23 - Acquisition - Stockholm, Nationalmuseum - As the unsuccessful bidder for L’Élève intéressante, which was immediately preempted by the Louvre (see the news item of 11/12/19) at the sale of the Ribes collection (see the news item) at Sotheby’s in Paris in December 2019, the Swedish museum was bound to go back in search of works by Marguerite Gérard. Its directors thus set their sights on a painting that is well known on the art market, recently offered by the Alexis Bordes gallery, which had even chosen it for the astonishing "Biennale" sale organised by Christie’s in Paris (see article). However, it was again on sale at Artcurial last March (see article), where it was sold at its low estimate - €80,000 hammer price, or €104,960 including costs - for the benefit of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. It is easy to understand the institution’s interest in this engaging canvas, which was exhibited under number 254 at the Salon of 1808 before joining the collection of Baron Empain (1862-1935) in Brussels in 1904. Undated but signed in the lower left-hand corner, the painting is therefore designated under the somewhat descriptive title it had in the 1808 Salon booklet. Perfectly representative of the artist’s style, worthy heir to the Fijnschilders of the Dutch Golden Age, this painting shows two figures dressed in largely anachronistic outfits that clash delightfully with the Empire armchair. Animals are never far away: under the globe, a cat seems to be watching the viewer, while a small dog perches on the seat and lets the young woman stroke it. Symbols of fidelity, they allude to the marital life she leads with the sender of the letter, who is probably off fighting.
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- 2. Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761-1845)
The Reading of the Bulletin of the Grande Armée, 1807
Oil on canvas - 47 x 60 cm
Saint Louis, Saint Louis Art Museum
Photo: Saint Louis Art Museum - See the image in its page
At the same Salon in 1808, Louis-Léopold Boilly presented two paintings very explicitly evoking the Napoleonic Wars: The 1807 conscripts marching past the Saint-Denis gate and The Reading of the Bulletin of the Grande Armée, in which (ill. 2) we also see a young woman dressed in white observing a geographical map. The protagonists in Boilly’s composition are dressed in contemporary fashion, unlike those in Marguerite Gérard’s, which, according to Carole Blumenfeld, "gives the work a greater historical resonance" since "the space for invention in old-fashioned costume makes it possible not to indulge in politics". A full-page illustration in the monograph published by Gourcuff Gradenigo in early 2019, the painting had previously been published by the specialist in one of the essays in the exhibition catalogue "Petits théâtres de l’intime. La peinture de genre française entre Révolution et Restauration" organised at the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse in 2011-2012 (see article).
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- 3. Marguerite Gérard (1761-1837)
Portrait of a Lady
Oil on canvas - 6.5 cm
Stockholm, Nationalmuseum
Photo: Nationalmuseum - See the image in its page
As early as the Salon of 1801, Marguerite Gérard proposed a Young Woman Consulting a Globe in search of the place from which her husband is writing to her, a painting lost but known from a copy. As Carole Blumenfeld points out in her monograph on the artist, she often avoided poignant scenes in favour of figures of expectation, whereas most of her fellow artists dealt with the departure or return of soldiers. The Bad News from the Salon of 1804, one of the most famous MNR paintings [1] in the Louvre, is however much more explicit and dramatic, showing a woman fainting after reading a letter. There is no doubt that the subject of our painting would be difficult to read without the long title given in the booklet for the Salon of 1808, to which the painter sent two other paintings: A Young Girl by her Sick Mother Prays to God for her Recovery, acquired by Cardinal Fesch and kept in a private collection, and Napoleon’s Clemency to Madame de Hatzfeld, bought by the Château de Malmaison in the early 1990s after having belonged to the Empress Josephine and then to Eugène de Beauharnais. The artist is now worthily represented in the collections of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, which until now only included a miniature (ill. 3) donated in 1927. It should be noted, however, that the political interpretation of the painting developed by Carole Blumenfeld - a specialist in the artist - was qualified by Alexandra Zvereva, who devoted a notice to it for the Alexis Bordes gallery, seeing it above all as a reinterpretation of the Dutch Golden Age, noting that the man with very little interest in the globe could just as easily have been a tutor waiting for his pupil to finish reading.