Study for ‘L’Astuce’ (‘Craftiness’), a decorative panel for the Hôtel Cail, Paris

A prolific decorative painter highly in demand during the Second Empire and later in Paris and beyond, Galland was at the height of his career when he was commissioned by the businessman Jean-François Cail to paint a large number of ceilings, overdoors and more for the mansion on the Boulevard Malesherbers in the French capital’s eighth arrondissement (J. Cerrano, Pierre-Victor Galland 1822-1892. Un Tiepolo français au XIXe siècle, exhib. cat., Roubaix, La Piscine, Musée d’Art et d’Industrie André-Diligent, and Beauvais, Galerie Nationale de la Tapisserie, 2006-2007, pp. 64-73, figs. 7-9). The building now houses the arrondissement’s town hall, and much of Galland’s work for the hôtel particulier is still in situ. That is not the case, however, for the decorative panel for which the present work served as a modello, and which is only known from an old photograph. A nude study in chalk in the museum La Piscine in Roubaix may have been made in preparation of the work under discussion (inv. 988-6-19; see Cerrano, op. cit., p. no. 42, ill. p. 38), while several similar oil sketches for another commission from the 1860s, the Hôtel Cassin, are in a private collection and at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (inv. 7946 A-1946 D; see Cerrano, op. cit., nos. 196-200, ill. pp. 196-197).