Provenance

Anonymous sale:  Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 27 November 1909, lot 127, illustrated

Dr. Léon Voillement (1881-1949), Paris (Lugt 789d)

Anonymous sale: Paris, Hôtel Drouot, Oger-Dumont, commissaires-priseurs, 13 March 1987, lot 26, illustrated [bt. Brady])

W. M. Brady & Co., New York

Private collection, Chagrin Falls, Ohio, 1988, thence by descent to a

Private collection, New York

Exhibitions

Paris, Galerie Greuze, Greuze et son école, 11 June – 30 June 1943, cat. no. 30

Literature

P. Gaston-Dreyfus and F. Ingersoll-Smouse, “Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint et dessiné de Nicholas-Bernard Lépicié,” in Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art français, Année 1922, Armand Colin, Paris, 1923, p. 237, cat. no. 356

Drawn circa 1769

Initially a pupil of his father, the engraver François-Bernard (1698-1755), and then of Carle Vanloo (1705-1765), Lépicié won second prize in the Prix de Rome competition of 1759.  While he never travelled to Rome, he became an academician in 1769, and a full professor ten years later in 1779.  Acclaimed as a genre painter and portraitist above all, he won several commissions for the Bâtiments du Roi. His work as a history painter requires more thorough scholarly inquiry.  A sympathetic and prolific draughtsman, Lépicié left a large corpus of drawings of great quality, including superb academies, genre portrait drawings, and extensive preparatory studies for his major compositions.

Between 1769 and 1771, Lépicié painted a suite of four allegorical panels of The Arts including Painting, Architecture, Sculpture, and Music. Painting and Architecture were exhibited at the Salon of 1769, while Sculpture was exhibited in Salon of 1771; the fourth panel, Music, was not exhibited at the Salon.  The suite of allegories may have been commissioned by Lépicié’s close friend and supporter, the engraver and draughtsman Charles-Nicolas Cochin (1715-1790), in whose estate sale they were sold as one lot in Paris on June 21, 1790 (lot 2).¹

Our fine sheet is a preliminary head study for the figure of Painting in the first of the four allegorical panels.  Swiftly and vigorously drawn with black and white chalk, the drawing shows the head of a woman with dishevelled hair held in place by a ribbon or band, looking to the left. In the final picture the artist adjusts the angle of the head only slightly downwards to bring her gaze into alignment with the laureate amor of inspiration at her left.  A second head study, for the figure of Sculpture in the third panel, is in the Louvre.²  In the same way, the artist adjusts the angle of the figure slightly upwards to bring her gaze into alignment, in this case, with the sculpted bust of Henri IV resting on a stand.