Estimate

20.000 - 30.000

Session 1

13 December 2021

Hammer Price

Description

A group of four oils on canvas

111,5x89 cm (cada)

Category

Paintings

Additional Information

Identified in the purchase book dated from 1894 with the description: " "4 tableaux femmes representant les saisons époque" and bought in Haua for 200 guilders
Identified in the "inventaire de meuble et objects de la maison calle Hortaleza 91 à Madrid" dated 1908 as: "4 tableaux: les quatre saisons", located at "Salle à mange"

THE SCHOOL OF CLAUDE DÉRUET (1588-1660)

The epitaph on the painter Claude Deruet tomb, at Nancy’s Carmelite church, states that there lies an artist that had never portrayed female nudity. Female beauty, rather than nudity, was truly the central focus of his paintings. As such, he established female aesthetic canons that turned him into an artist highly favoured by women patrons, similarly to the brothers Henri and Charles Beaubrun. The demand for portraits in the “Deruet style” can be easily assessed by the numbers of extant paintings attributed to several of his followers, or from his studio, that emerge in the art market, the present allegorical works being a further example. In terms of composition and painting techniques the group of paintings that we are presenting for sale at auction, evidence characteristics that allow for a safe attribution to a follower of Claude Deruet. The artistic ideal affirming that physical reality must be accentuated in portraiture, remits to a Mannerist concept in which it is argued that the artist must in fact have the final word. Under signs of deformation and of extreme, Deruet applies rather indiscriminately his “pictorial twitches”. Thus, be it in religious or allegorical paintings, his various defining characteristics emerge continuously in the almond shaped eyes, the perfect eyebrows, the subtle shadows that seem to elongate noses, the porcelain white skin and the red mouths - enhancing the identically coloured cheeks – that are reduced to little more than fine lines. When seen, the sitters’ hands are large, fine and disjointed. The beautifying of the young sitters is circumspect by the almost total absence of jewellery, beyond a discrete pearl necklace, and by the discretion of costume. Truly the female body seems to be the favourite vehicle for mannerist deformations and elongations and Déruet generally adds readaptations from Bellange’s models such as slightly projecting stomachs. Son of Charles Deruet, clock maker to the Dukes of Lorraine, and of Françoise de Naiz, Claude was born in 1588 into a prosperous family with four other offspring. His decision to embrace an artistic career arose when he was 16 or 17 years old, driving him to signing a learning agreement, dated April 19th, 1605, with the artist Jacques Bellange (1575-1616). His early sketches, as well as the silhouettes he produces, are exemplary that the teachings of his first master never abandoned him. By no means due to incapacity, but perhaps by conviction and fidelity to an early model, it was perhaps Bellange artistic style that guided the young Claude into becoming a painter. His body of work is full of strange and exuberant, yet elegant, figures that even the Abbot Michel de Marolles (1600-1682) admired and collected. Under Bellange’s protection Deruet crossed, albeit indirectly, the earliest interpretations of the Mannerism that had arrived via Lorraine thanks to the political and artistic ties with Florence, Mantua, Fontainebleau, Parmesai and Fréminet, and which had also had evident impact on his master’s production. Honours flooded in in the Summer of 1619, on Claude Deruet return to Nancy. The King of France, Henry II granted him a house and a pension endowment, and the Dukes of Lorraine appointed him as their official painter. Simultaneously he was appointed a Knight of the Order of Christ in Portugal, becoming the perfect successor for Bellange. His fame, however, does not explain all his success. By carefully analysing Deruet’s work it is clear that it was well adapted to a prevalent court taste, and hence distinct from the grandiloquent Catholic Church Baroque and from Caravaggio’s “vulgarities”, privileging instead all themes that embody nobility and chivalric values.

TIAGO FRANCO RODRIGUES

LITERATURE: Fessenden, DeWitt H. - The Life and Works of Claude Deruet: court painter, 1588–1660. Brooklyn, 1952. Rosenberg, P. – France in the Golden Age Seventeenth-Century French Paintings in American Collections, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nova Iorque, 2013