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Lot Essay
Among the most talented history painters of the first half of the 18th century, the French-born Subleyras spent virtually his entire career working in Italy. Trained at the Acadmie Royale in Paris, he moved to Rome after winning the Grand Prix in 1727 and quickly established himself as one of the most successful painters in the city. Like Poussin a century earlier, he was really as much a son of Rome as of Paris.
During the 1730s and 1740s Subleyras received numerous commissions from churches and religious orders, and he brought to these altarpieces a carefully, often tenderly, observed naturalism free of the false rhetoric which sometimes diminished the works of his Acadmie-trained contemporaries. Though he joined Pompeo Batoni in spearheading the movement to reform Roman painting by returning it to nature, his deliberated and inward-looking art is closer in spirit to the still-life painting of Chardin than to the works of his fellow history painters.
While Subleyras only occasionally turned his attention to genre painting (he excelled at witty -- and sometimes lewd -- illustrations of La Fontaine's Contes), he developed an active practice as a portrait painter. Many of the great aristocrats of the time sat to him, among them princes, cardinals and scholars. Through the intervention of Cardinal Valente Gonzaga, an advisor to the Pope who became Subleyras's protector, the artist was chosen to paint the newly elected Benedict XIV, a commission which secured his reputation (1741; Muse Conde, Chantilly; a superb replica was recently sold at Christie's, London).
Everett Fahy first recognized the present portrait as the work of Subleyras, and the attribution was quickly and universally endorsed. Alastair Laing identified the young sitter's dress as of Hungarian origin and speculated that the boy could be the Hungarian prince Paul Anton II von Esterhazy (1738-1794), from whom Count Anton Franz de Paula von Lamberg-Sprinzenstein (1740-1823) acquired the version of Subleyras's Mass of Saint Basil which he left to the Akademie der bildenden Kunste in Vienna. The Vienna sketch is presumed to have been painted in 1743 -- the year the artist began the altarpiece for which it is a study -- when Paul Anton would have been five years old, the approximate age of our sitter. It is tempting to speculate that Paul Anton's father, Prince Nikolaus Joseph (1714-1790), Haydn's patron, may have visited Rome at this date and acquired the sketch from Subleyras while commissioning this portrait of his son.
A second hypothesis, advanced by Bianca Riccio, is that the portrait depicts a member of one of the reigning Italian families in Rome, dressed in Hungarian costume. If so, the boy would most probably have been of the Odescalchi family, members of whom are known to have patronized Subleyras (his Portrait of Cardinal Benedetto Odescalchi Erba is in the Museo de Arte in Ponce, Puerto Rico). The Odescalchi had long had ties to Hungary, and a set of Magyar costumes owned by the family is preserved in the Museo di Palazzo Venezia in Rome.
Regardless of the boy's identity, he wears a fashionable wig of the 1740s and the picture's style accords well with a dating to this decade. The portrait is remarkable in its combination of the formal and the intimate. Subleyras has ingeniously integrated attributes traditional to the depiction of children with the conventions of full-blown Baroque state portraiture.
In front of a trompe l'oeil of baby satyrs at play, copied from a relief by Duquesnoy, the young prince stands surrounded by various symbols of vanitas such as a mirror, pocketwatch, and a shuttlecock, familiar from Chardin's allegorical depictions of children. Turning away from childish things with a self-confident swagger, he holds the timepiece in one hand and grasps his sheathed sword in the other, in an image that is both charming and disquieting. While Subleyras's portrait would find its closest counterpart in Boucher's famous Portrait of Philippe-Egalit as a Child of 1749 (Waddesdon Manor), the hint of impending violence suggested by the standoff between dog and cat anticipates Goya's unsettling Portrait of Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuiga of 1788 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Fig. 1). Subleyras was famous for the virtuoso array of whites he could deploy in a single painting, a skill rarely displayed to better advantage than here, where snow-white feathers, fur, silk brocade, lace and hair punctuate and anchor the portrait's simple, powerful composition.
During the 1730s and 1740s Subleyras received numerous commissions from churches and religious orders, and he brought to these altarpieces a carefully, often tenderly, observed naturalism free of the false rhetoric which sometimes diminished the works of his Acadmie-trained contemporaries. Though he joined Pompeo Batoni in spearheading the movement to reform Roman painting by returning it to nature, his deliberated and inward-looking art is closer in spirit to the still-life painting of Chardin than to the works of his fellow history painters.
While Subleyras only occasionally turned his attention to genre painting (he excelled at witty -- and sometimes lewd -- illustrations of La Fontaine's Contes), he developed an active practice as a portrait painter. Many of the great aristocrats of the time sat to him, among them princes, cardinals and scholars. Through the intervention of Cardinal Valente Gonzaga, an advisor to the Pope who became Subleyras's protector, the artist was chosen to paint the newly elected Benedict XIV, a commission which secured his reputation (1741; Muse Conde, Chantilly; a superb replica was recently sold at Christie's, London).
Everett Fahy first recognized the present portrait as the work of Subleyras, and the attribution was quickly and universally endorsed. Alastair Laing identified the young sitter's dress as of Hungarian origin and speculated that the boy could be the Hungarian prince Paul Anton II von Esterhazy (1738-1794), from whom Count Anton Franz de Paula von Lamberg-Sprinzenstein (1740-1823) acquired the version of Subleyras's Mass of Saint Basil which he left to the Akademie der bildenden Kunste in Vienna. The Vienna sketch is presumed to have been painted in 1743 -- the year the artist began the altarpiece for which it is a study -- when Paul Anton would have been five years old, the approximate age of our sitter. It is tempting to speculate that Paul Anton's father, Prince Nikolaus Joseph (1714-1790), Haydn's patron, may have visited Rome at this date and acquired the sketch from Subleyras while commissioning this portrait of his son.
A second hypothesis, advanced by Bianca Riccio, is that the portrait depicts a member of one of the reigning Italian families in Rome, dressed in Hungarian costume. If so, the boy would most probably have been of the Odescalchi family, members of whom are known to have patronized Subleyras (his Portrait of Cardinal Benedetto Odescalchi Erba is in the Museo de Arte in Ponce, Puerto Rico). The Odescalchi had long had ties to Hungary, and a set of Magyar costumes owned by the family is preserved in the Museo di Palazzo Venezia in Rome.
Regardless of the boy's identity, he wears a fashionable wig of the 1740s and the picture's style accords well with a dating to this decade. The portrait is remarkable in its combination of the formal and the intimate. Subleyras has ingeniously integrated attributes traditional to the depiction of children with the conventions of full-blown Baroque state portraiture.
In front of a trompe l'oeil of baby satyrs at play, copied from a relief by Duquesnoy, the young prince stands surrounded by various symbols of vanitas such as a mirror, pocketwatch, and a shuttlecock, familiar from Chardin's allegorical depictions of children. Turning away from childish things with a self-confident swagger, he holds the timepiece in one hand and grasps his sheathed sword in the other, in an image that is both charming and disquieting. While Subleyras's portrait would find its closest counterpart in Boucher's famous Portrait of Philippe-Egalit as a Child of 1749 (Waddesdon Manor), the hint of impending violence suggested by the standoff between dog and cat anticipates Goya's unsettling Portrait of Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuiga of 1788 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Fig. 1). Subleyras was famous for the virtuoso array of whites he could deploy in a single painting, a skill rarely displayed to better advantage than here, where snow-white feathers, fur, silk brocade, lace and hair punctuate and anchor the portrait's simple, powerful composition.