Lot Essay
A study for Le Printemps, painted by the artist as the reception piece for his admission at the Académie and presented at the Salon of 1781. It was destined to be set in one of the compartments of the ceiling in the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre where it remains today, M. Sandoz, Antoine-François Callet, Paris, 1985, no. 21, pl. I.
Callet had built a reputation as a painter of large ceiling decorations in Genoa for the Palazzo Spinola, and above all after his return to Paris at the Palais Bourbon, in the Duc de Bourbon's hôtel, now the Chambre des deputés overlooking the Seine and the Place de la Concorde. There he carried out a decorative scheme on the theme of Venus and Flora, all close in composition to the present drawing. Two oil sketches, one at the Louvre (fig. 1) and the other in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Cholet, would date from an earlier phase in the development of the composition and are closer to the present design than the final version.
Callet had built a reputation as a painter of large ceiling decorations in Genoa for the Palazzo Spinola, and above all after his return to Paris at the Palais Bourbon, in the Duc de Bourbon's hôtel, now the Chambre des deputés overlooking the Seine and the Place de la Concorde. There he carried out a decorative scheme on the theme of Venus and Flora, all close in composition to the present drawing. Two oil sketches, one at the Louvre (fig. 1) and the other in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Cholet, would date from an earlier phase in the development of the composition and are closer to the present design than the final version.