Lot Essay
This picture is a fascinating puzzle. According to the inscription (signature?) it was painted by Ernest Gustave Girardot at the age of eleven, and it seems unlikely that anyone would make this statement if it was untrue, bearing in mind Girardot's relative obscurity. On the other hand, it is hard to believe that an eleven-year-old artist was responsible for such a tour de force.
According to Christopher Wood's Dictionary of Victorian Painters (2nd ed., 1978), Girardot flourished from 1860 to 1893, exhibiting portraits, genre scenes and literary subjects at the Royal Academy and Suffolk Street. His Witt Library file contains a number of his genre subjects, painted in an attractive and rather French style. If the inscription on the present painting is correct, the date of his birth must be 1830 or 1831, but it is not known if he was born in France or England, or what his career consisted of before he began to exhibit in 1860. There is no evidence that he later painted animal themes.
This painting is close in style and technique to the animal pictures of James Northcote (1746-1831), who was working near Mere in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, painting a large Vulture and Snake for Sir John Leicester at Tabley House, Knutsford. If the present picture is indeed by the young and precocious Girardot, it must have been painted under Northcote's influence ten years after the older artist's death.
According to Christopher Wood's Dictionary of Victorian Painters (2nd ed., 1978), Girardot flourished from 1860 to 1893, exhibiting portraits, genre scenes and literary subjects at the Royal Academy and Suffolk Street. His Witt Library file contains a number of his genre subjects, painted in an attractive and rather French style. If the inscription on the present painting is correct, the date of his birth must be 1830 or 1831, but it is not known if he was born in France or England, or what his career consisted of before he began to exhibit in 1860. There is no evidence that he later painted animal themes.
This painting is close in style and technique to the animal pictures of James Northcote (1746-1831), who was working near Mere in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, painting a large Vulture and Snake for Sir John Leicester at Tabley House, Knutsford. If the present picture is indeed by the young and precocious Girardot, it must have been painted under Northcote's influence ten years after the older artist's death.