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Lot Essay
Pallière’s small-scale, full-length portrait of Nicolas-Pierre Tiolier posing in the gardens of the Villa Medici in Rome is a charming memento of a warm friendship that had developed between two young artists during the heady years of their apprenticeship at the French Academy in Rome. Born in Bordeaux in 1787, Pallière trained with François-André Vincent at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and arrived in Rome as a pensionnaire at the French Academy after being awarded the prestigious Grand Prix in 1812 for his history painting Ulysses and Telemachus Slaying Penelope’s Suitors. Once in Rome, he joined a group of fellow pensionnaires training in the various fine arts at the Villa Medici, where they studied and lived for four years at the state’s expense.
Tiolier was himself a student at Villa Medici, and enjoyed the distinction of having been the only pensionnaire to have ever received an award for engraving on hard stone. (After his sojourn in Rome, he returned to Paris, exhibited medals regularly at the annual Salon for almost twenty years and served as Vérificateur des monnaies de la garantie.) In Pallière’s affectionate portrait, the fashionably dressed Tiolier pauses from work, sketchpad and drawing implements in hand, to glance confidently at the onlooker, his left foot resting on a toppled piece of old masonry, a sculpted Herm oblivious to the presence of the rakish dandy. The medal-maker poses, and his friend paints him, in the magnificent gardens of what was – for a few idyllic years – their shared home.
Signed, dated, and dedicated ‘a son ami Tiolier’, the present portrait was executed in 1818, a fact only made possible because the painter’s pensionnat - which should have ended in 1816 - was extended by the new director of the Academy, Charles Thévenin, so that Pallière could continue work on the Flagellation of Christ, part of the redecoration of Santa Trinità dei Monti, the French church at the top of the Spanish Steps, adjacent to the Villa Medici.
It had long been regular practice for the young artists at the Villa Medici to draw or paint each other. Such portraits must have been made and exchanged by the artists as expressions of fraternity and group solidarity. François-André Vincent - Pallière’s teacher - produced an extensive series of witty chalk caricatures of his fellow students during his stay at the French Academy in the 1770s. A number of David’s most illustrious pupils – Baron Gros, François Gérard, Girodet, among them – made bust-length portraits of themselves or each other in the 1790s, which they traded during their years in Rome. Pallière’s portrait of Tiolier fits into a format which is found frequently in the years around 1810-20: small, full-length portraits by students depicting their colleagues in the Villa Medici itself, often in their small quarters in the building. Pallière was himself the subject of a portrait made in 1817 by Jean Alaux (1785-1864), Pallière’s friend since their childhood in Bordeaux (today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). In it, Pallière is posed in his quarters playing a guitar, seated against a narrow bed, his left foot raised on the seat of a chair, much as he would position Tiolier’s leg the following year. Pallière’s room is meticulously described, with his own sketches pinned to the walls around him and the window sashes flung open to the garden view beyond. Pallière kept the portrait his entire life; Alaux was able to repossess it in 1827, when he married Pallière’s widow, Françoise-Virginie.
A copy of this compostion by François Eduard Picot is in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (inv. no. PD.97-1978).
Tiolier was himself a student at Villa Medici, and enjoyed the distinction of having been the only pensionnaire to have ever received an award for engraving on hard stone. (After his sojourn in Rome, he returned to Paris, exhibited medals regularly at the annual Salon for almost twenty years and served as Vérificateur des monnaies de la garantie.) In Pallière’s affectionate portrait, the fashionably dressed Tiolier pauses from work, sketchpad and drawing implements in hand, to glance confidently at the onlooker, his left foot resting on a toppled piece of old masonry, a sculpted Herm oblivious to the presence of the rakish dandy. The medal-maker poses, and his friend paints him, in the magnificent gardens of what was – for a few idyllic years – their shared home.
Signed, dated, and dedicated ‘a son ami Tiolier’, the present portrait was executed in 1818, a fact only made possible because the painter’s pensionnat - which should have ended in 1816 - was extended by the new director of the Academy, Charles Thévenin, so that Pallière could continue work on the Flagellation of Christ, part of the redecoration of Santa Trinità dei Monti, the French church at the top of the Spanish Steps, adjacent to the Villa Medici.
It had long been regular practice for the young artists at the Villa Medici to draw or paint each other. Such portraits must have been made and exchanged by the artists as expressions of fraternity and group solidarity. François-André Vincent - Pallière’s teacher - produced an extensive series of witty chalk caricatures of his fellow students during his stay at the French Academy in the 1770s. A number of David’s most illustrious pupils – Baron Gros, François Gérard, Girodet, among them – made bust-length portraits of themselves or each other in the 1790s, which they traded during their years in Rome. Pallière’s portrait of Tiolier fits into a format which is found frequently in the years around 1810-20: small, full-length portraits by students depicting their colleagues in the Villa Medici itself, often in their small quarters in the building. Pallière was himself the subject of a portrait made in 1817 by Jean Alaux (1785-1864), Pallière’s friend since their childhood in Bordeaux (today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). In it, Pallière is posed in his quarters playing a guitar, seated against a narrow bed, his left foot raised on the seat of a chair, much as he would position Tiolier’s leg the following year. Pallière’s room is meticulously described, with his own sketches pinned to the walls around him and the window sashes flung open to the garden view beyond. Pallière kept the portrait his entire life; Alaux was able to repossess it in 1827, when he married Pallière’s widow, Françoise-Virginie.
A copy of this compostion by François Eduard Picot is in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (inv. no. PD.97-1978).