Allegory of painting

One of the most gifted French artists of his generation, whose facility was considered little short of prodigious, Jean-François de Troy was the son of a celebrated history painter, trained in Rome, rose to the highest ranks of the Académie Royale, received illustrious crown and state commissions, and ended a long career as Director of the French Academy in Rome. Acclaimed in his lifetime as one of the most ambitious and fluent masters of grand manner (and grand-scale) paintings of historical, biblical and mythological subjects, De Troy is today revered for a series of small-scale contemporary genre scenes depicting the social rituals of the Parisian haute monde, known as ‘tableaux de mode’ (loosely translated as ‘Fashionable Pictures’), including the famous Reading from Moliere (private collection), a pair of paintings known as The Declaration of Love and The Garter formerly in the Wrightsman collection (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), and The Reading Party (private collection), which was sold at Christie’s, London, 8 December 2022, lot 28.

In addition to his success as a painter of history subjects and scenes of contemporary life, De Troy was among the most productive and sought-after painters of decorative canvases in Paris throughout his career. During the period of roughly a single decade, from approximately 1725 through 1737 – the same years during which he was producing the ‘Tableaux de Mode’ – De Troy painted a series of mythological canvases for the Duc de Lorraine (lost), hunt decorations for the ‘petits appartements’ and Grand Dining Room of Louis XV at Versailles (today in the Musée du Picardie, Amiens, and the Louvre, Paris, respectively), and a suite of 35 overdoors and decorative panels for the Paris hôtel particulier of François-Christophe de La Live, the wealthy Receiver-General of Finance for Poitiers. The canvases painted for La Live’s house are recorded as having been ‘inserted in the boiseries’ – curved molding that was carved and gilded – above doorways and windows, and they depicted allegorical themes that were traditionally used in decorative room schemes, including ‘the Four Continents, the Four Elements, the Five Senses, the Four Seasons, the Arts and Sciences’. These decorations seem to have been dismantled and sold off following La Live’s death in 1753.

In the present Allegory of Painting, a beautiful young woman is the personification of the Visual Arts. She dips her paintbrush on a palette borne to her by Genius, arriving in the form of a winged putto who bears the flame of Inspiration atop his head. In her other hand, Painting holds a mahlstick and more brushes, while behind her appear folios of drawings and plaster casts to guide her work. The golden chain around her neck is one of the attributes suggested by Cesare Ripa in his Iconologia as suitable for the personification of Painting. As noted by Christophe Leribault in his catalogue raisonné of De Troy’s paintings, the subject of the painting on which she works is ‘Apollo and the Muses, with Pegasus’ (loc. cit.). In it, the young god is shown holding his lyre and gazing on the winged horse whose flight represents Inspiration. Below are the nine Muses, the goddesses of creative inspiration in the arts, with Euterpe and Terpsichore prominent among them.

The present painting – which is in a beautiful state of preservation – is executed in the robust and painterly, yet polished manner that De Troy had fully mastered by the 1730s, with its central figures meticulously finished, and background and peripheral details more rapidly and loosely evoked. Its warm palette of earthy browns and soft ivory whites represents, as Leribault observed, De Troy’s ‘peak of refinement’, with the contrast between Painting’s gentle pallor and the tawny complexion of Genius demonstrating the coloristic sensitivity for which De Troy was admired by his contemporaries (ibid.).

Because of its subject, format and obvious function as an overdoor, the Allegory of Painting has often been associated with the decorations for La Live’s townhouse. However, a receipt from De Troy acknowledges having received full payment from La Live in November 1727 for all 35 paintings, therefore making it unlikely that the present painting – which is signed and dated ‘1733’ – was part of the commission. A famously quick painter who was said to design his history compositions in his head without the use of drawings and studies, and to refrain from repainting once he had begun, De Troy would almost certainly not have been working on even so large a project for more than six years.

If the painting was not made for La Live, it would certainly have figured in another such grand decorative commission as yet to be identified. Three overdoors by De Troy of comparable scale and dimensions to the Allegory of Painting, and of complementary allegorical subject matter, have been recognized by Leribault as likely forming part of such a suite of decorations. Each signed and dated ‘1733’, the group includes two upright oval canvases depicting female personifications of Poetry and Music (figs. 1 and 2; measuring 1,03 x 0,96 cm., each; Leribault P.214 & P.215; Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon) and a third horizontal oval of dimensions and format identical to the present painting representing the figure of Prudence (Leribault P.213; private collection, France). It may be worth considering whether Time Unveiling Truth (Leribault P.217; National Gallery, London) – a multi-figural allegorical painting of much larger dimensions (2,03 x 2,08 cm.) – might have served as a centerpiece in the decorative scheme. It, too, is signed and dated ‘1733’, is of similar palette and identical handling to the overdoors, and was likewise created for an unknown patron.