Portrait of a young woman, seated, near a fountain in a landscape

Born near Colmar, on the Prussian border, Martin Drölling’s early life is obscure. He studied drawing at Schlestadt and moved to Paris in 1780 when he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts. He exhibited at the Salon de la Correspondance beginning in 1781 and at the Paris Salon from 1793 to 1817. Drölling’s art was almost exclusively devoted to portraiture and genre painting in the then-popular style of the seventeenth-century Dutch ‘Little Masters’. Like Louis-Léopold Boilly and Marguerite Gérard, he depicted everyday scenes with an attention to detail which deliberately recalled the high finish and refined articulation of paintings by Gerrit Dou, David Teniers and Frans van Mieris.

The present, small-scale genre painting, which is signed on its face and dated ‘1806’ on the reverse of the canvas, depicts a pretty young girl wearing a fashionable white, high-waisted Empire dress with short sleeves, as was the style around 1805, and red wool shawl, her hair dressed in cedilla curls à la antique. She sits alone beside a fountain that takes the form of an ancient column, in an overgrown ‘English’-style garden. At her feet is a blue vase which has broken into pieces. The influence of seventeenth-century Dutch painting is evident in the shimmering sheen with which Drölling meticulously renders her satin dress, evidently inspired by Gerard ter Borch. The prominent and somewhat incongruously placed broken vase imbues the picture with an element of suggested narrative, serving as a gentle admonition against the dangers of passion, its shattered form a well-established symbol of fallen virtue.