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Lot Essay
Jean Charles Sapey, captured in this handsome portrait by Louise Vigée Le Brun during the Second Bourbon Restoration, served his country as a military officer, a civil administrator and a legislator. He was the youngest of eleven children born to Charles Sapey (c. 1725-after 1789), a royal notary and landholder whose ancestors probably came from the area of the Massif de la Grande Chartreuse, and Marie Anne Maingrat (1733-1776).
Having completed his studies before the outbreak of the French Revolution – he was originally destined for the priesthood – Charles Sapey entered the military academy at Tournon. He joined the 9th Battalion of Volunteers in the département of the Isère, a corps that was created in early April 1794 (Germinal an II) and was eventually integrated into the French armies serving under General Napoleon Bonaparte in the Alps, the kingdom of Naples and other parts of Italy. He was apparently held as prisoner for a period of two months at the time of the siege of Mantua in 1796-1797.
In 1794 Sapey was put in charge of the company that controlled shipping between Continental Europe and the island of Corsica. He was also a major supplier of ships and munitions to the Armée du Midi and for a time worked with Christophe Salicetti, the Corsican ally of Robespierre in various places, including the port city of Livorno. Over time, these assignments must have netted him considerable wealth. This activity brought him into close contact with the Bonapartes, especially Napoleon’s younger brother, Lucien (fig. 1) – then such a radical Montagnard revolutionary allied with Robespierre and his acolytes that he styled himself ‘Brutus’ – and with the matriarch of the clan, Maria Laetizia Ramolino Buonaparte.
By the spring of 1799, Sapey was in Paris, where he leased the Château de Bagatelle, the beautiful little pleasure house built and embellished between 1777 and the mid-1780s near the Bois de Boulogne for Louis XVI’s sybaritic younger brother, the comte d’Artois and future Charles X. In Sapey’s time, the house and its extensive gardens had been sold by the revolutionary government to the restaurateur André Lhéritier and a consortium of investors. Later that year, Lucien, who was President of one of the two legislative bodies during the Directoire, the Council of Five Hundred, was largely instrumental in carrying out the coup d’état that took place on 9 November 1799 and gave his older brother Napoléon dictatorial powers, leading the way to the creation of the Empire. Lucien was named Minister of the Interior, and Sapey remained at his side as one of his private secretaries.
In 1800, having violently quarreled with Joseph Fouché, his brother’s Minister of Police, Lucien was sent to Madrid as an ambassador with the mission of bringing the Spanish into line with France’s expansionist ambitions. Sapey was posted there the following year as one of the secretaries of the French legation. By 1804 the two were in Milan, where Sapey was asked to be godfather to Lucien’s daughter, Marie-Laetitia, with his second wife, Alexandrine de Bleschamp, widow of the banker Hippolyte Jouberthon.
In 1805 Sapey acquired property at Beaugency near Orléans, but he sold it to purchase the 17th-century Château de La Barre at Férolles-Atilly near Melun and Brie-Comte-Robert. During the Hundred Days, while remaining faithful to the Bonapartes, Sapey played no active part and lived in seclusion on his estate. Following the fall of the Napoleonic Empire and the inauguration of Louis XVIII, Charles Sapey remained steadfastly loyal to his friend, Lucien, pursuing a political career in the Chamber of Deputies, where for many years he sat with the liberal opposition (fig. 2).
The fall of the Empire took place to the great delight of the ultra-conservative Vigée Le Brun, who was a committed royalist. This makes the commissioning of the present portrait rather perplexing. It may be explained by the fact that the artist had gotten along rather well with Lucien Bonaparte, himself an art aficionado who greatly admired her three-quarter-length Emma Hamilton as the Sybil of Cumes of 1792, now at Ramsbury Manor, Wiltshire. In 1819, when this portrait was painted, Charles Sapey was mayor of Férolles-Atilly. It was in this year that he published a defense of his right, despite the fact that he owned property in other parts of France, to represent the department of the Isère in the Chambre des Députés.
Sapey remained a bachelor until 27 July 1821, when he married Angélique Eulalie Boby (1790-1867), daughter of a former magistrate in the Parlement de Paris and the widow of General Raymond-Pierre Penne (1770-1815), who had been killed at the Battle of Wavre. The couple had three daughters – Marie-Caroline (c. 1820-1842), Angélique-Marie (c. 1824-1844) and Eugénie-Aglaé-Adèle (fig. 3). The youngest achieved considerable notoriety, first by her marriage to Charles-Eugène, marquis Feydeau de Brou (1815-1882), the scion of a distinguished French family of public officials, and then by the very prominent role she played in Parisian society as a patroness of such celebrated French musicians as Camille Saint-Saens, Ambroise Thomas, Gabriel Fauré and Jules Massenet.
Between 1802 and 1848 Charles Sapey served twelve terms in the Assemblée Nationale and the Chambre des Députés. Under Louis-Philippe he was a permanent member of the Court of Auditors (Cour des Comptes). In early 1852, at the outset of the Second Empire, he was appointed by Napoléon III to the French Senate in which he sat until his death in his Paris apartment on the rue Saint-Dominique on 5 May 5 1857, after which he was buried in the Cimetière Montparnasse (for a full account of Sapey’s life, see A. Albertin, Histoire contemporaine de Grenoble de la région dauphinoise, II, Grenoble, 1900, pp. 142-143).
Though this portrait is unpublished, the model’s name is included in Vigée Le Brun’s lists of individuals who sat for her following her return to France in 1802 (loc. cit.). It was painted in the artist’s studio on the rue d’Anjou the very year she painted her portrait of the singer, Madame Lafont (fig. 4), wife of the celebrated violinist Charles-Philippe Lafont, a work that later featured in the Salon of 1824.
Sapey, in his mid-forties at the time this portrait was painted, has a head distinguished by its angular features. His dark hair and sideburns are swept forward onto his forehead and around his temples. His eyebrows are strongly arched above piercing blue eyes, and his gaze, seen through slightly drooping eyelids, as well as his closed mouth above an aristocratic cleft chin give him an almost haughty appearance. The points of the high collar of his white vest protrude above the velvet lapels of his dark coat, to which is pinned the red ribbon of the Légion d’honneur, of which he had been made an officer during the Empire. A gray scumble enlivens the pinkish ochre ground to which it has been applied. The painting’s exceptionally good state of preservation allows for full appreciation of the artist’s delicate glazes applied over the flesh tones, a hallmark of her technique since the 1780s.
This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the works of Vigée Le Brun by Joseph Baillio.
Joseph Baillio
Having completed his studies before the outbreak of the French Revolution – he was originally destined for the priesthood – Charles Sapey entered the military academy at Tournon. He joined the 9th Battalion of Volunteers in the département of the Isère, a corps that was created in early April 1794 (Germinal an II) and was eventually integrated into the French armies serving under General Napoleon Bonaparte in the Alps, the kingdom of Naples and other parts of Italy. He was apparently held as prisoner for a period of two months at the time of the siege of Mantua in 1796-1797.
In 1794 Sapey was put in charge of the company that controlled shipping between Continental Europe and the island of Corsica. He was also a major supplier of ships and munitions to the Armée du Midi and for a time worked with Christophe Salicetti, the Corsican ally of Robespierre in various places, including the port city of Livorno. Over time, these assignments must have netted him considerable wealth. This activity brought him into close contact with the Bonapartes, especially Napoleon’s younger brother, Lucien (fig. 1) – then such a radical Montagnard revolutionary allied with Robespierre and his acolytes that he styled himself ‘Brutus’ – and with the matriarch of the clan, Maria Laetizia Ramolino Buonaparte.
By the spring of 1799, Sapey was in Paris, where he leased the Château de Bagatelle, the beautiful little pleasure house built and embellished between 1777 and the mid-1780s near the Bois de Boulogne for Louis XVI’s sybaritic younger brother, the comte d’Artois and future Charles X. In Sapey’s time, the house and its extensive gardens had been sold by the revolutionary government to the restaurateur André Lhéritier and a consortium of investors. Later that year, Lucien, who was President of one of the two legislative bodies during the Directoire, the Council of Five Hundred, was largely instrumental in carrying out the coup d’état that took place on 9 November 1799 and gave his older brother Napoléon dictatorial powers, leading the way to the creation of the Empire. Lucien was named Minister of the Interior, and Sapey remained at his side as one of his private secretaries.
In 1800, having violently quarreled with Joseph Fouché, his brother’s Minister of Police, Lucien was sent to Madrid as an ambassador with the mission of bringing the Spanish into line with France’s expansionist ambitions. Sapey was posted there the following year as one of the secretaries of the French legation. By 1804 the two were in Milan, where Sapey was asked to be godfather to Lucien’s daughter, Marie-Laetitia, with his second wife, Alexandrine de Bleschamp, widow of the banker Hippolyte Jouberthon.
In 1805 Sapey acquired property at Beaugency near Orléans, but he sold it to purchase the 17th-century Château de La Barre at Férolles-Atilly near Melun and Brie-Comte-Robert. During the Hundred Days, while remaining faithful to the Bonapartes, Sapey played no active part and lived in seclusion on his estate. Following the fall of the Napoleonic Empire and the inauguration of Louis XVIII, Charles Sapey remained steadfastly loyal to his friend, Lucien, pursuing a political career in the Chamber of Deputies, where for many years he sat with the liberal opposition (fig. 2).
The fall of the Empire took place to the great delight of the ultra-conservative Vigée Le Brun, who was a committed royalist. This makes the commissioning of the present portrait rather perplexing. It may be explained by the fact that the artist had gotten along rather well with Lucien Bonaparte, himself an art aficionado who greatly admired her three-quarter-length Emma Hamilton as the Sybil of Cumes of 1792, now at Ramsbury Manor, Wiltshire. In 1819, when this portrait was painted, Charles Sapey was mayor of Férolles-Atilly. It was in this year that he published a defense of his right, despite the fact that he owned property in other parts of France, to represent the department of the Isère in the Chambre des Députés.
Sapey remained a bachelor until 27 July 1821, when he married Angélique Eulalie Boby (1790-1867), daughter of a former magistrate in the Parlement de Paris and the widow of General Raymond-Pierre Penne (1770-1815), who had been killed at the Battle of Wavre. The couple had three daughters – Marie-Caroline (c. 1820-1842), Angélique-Marie (c. 1824-1844) and Eugénie-Aglaé-Adèle (fig. 3). The youngest achieved considerable notoriety, first by her marriage to Charles-Eugène, marquis Feydeau de Brou (1815-1882), the scion of a distinguished French family of public officials, and then by the very prominent role she played in Parisian society as a patroness of such celebrated French musicians as Camille Saint-Saens, Ambroise Thomas, Gabriel Fauré and Jules Massenet.
Between 1802 and 1848 Charles Sapey served twelve terms in the Assemblée Nationale and the Chambre des Députés. Under Louis-Philippe he was a permanent member of the Court of Auditors (Cour des Comptes). In early 1852, at the outset of the Second Empire, he was appointed by Napoléon III to the French Senate in which he sat until his death in his Paris apartment on the rue Saint-Dominique on 5 May 5 1857, after which he was buried in the Cimetière Montparnasse (for a full account of Sapey’s life, see A. Albertin, Histoire contemporaine de Grenoble de la région dauphinoise, II, Grenoble, 1900, pp. 142-143).
Though this portrait is unpublished, the model’s name is included in Vigée Le Brun’s lists of individuals who sat for her following her return to France in 1802 (loc. cit.). It was painted in the artist’s studio on the rue d’Anjou the very year she painted her portrait of the singer, Madame Lafont (fig. 4), wife of the celebrated violinist Charles-Philippe Lafont, a work that later featured in the Salon of 1824.
Sapey, in his mid-forties at the time this portrait was painted, has a head distinguished by its angular features. His dark hair and sideburns are swept forward onto his forehead and around his temples. His eyebrows are strongly arched above piercing blue eyes, and his gaze, seen through slightly drooping eyelids, as well as his closed mouth above an aristocratic cleft chin give him an almost haughty appearance. The points of the high collar of his white vest protrude above the velvet lapels of his dark coat, to which is pinned the red ribbon of the Légion d’honneur, of which he had been made an officer during the Empire. A gray scumble enlivens the pinkish ochre ground to which it has been applied. The painting’s exceptionally good state of preservation allows for full appreciation of the artist’s delicate glazes applied over the flesh tones, a hallmark of her technique since the 1780s.
This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the works of Vigée Le Brun by Joseph Baillio.
Joseph Baillio