Portrait of Barthélémy Charles, Comte de Dreux-Nancré (1760-1863), small full-length, standing in front of a balustrade, a landscape beyond

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, enrolling at the École des Beaux-Arts that year. He exhibited at the Salon de la Correspondance beginning in 1781 and at the Paris Salon from 1793 until 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 II and Frans van Mieris.

Barthélémy Charles, Comte de Dreux-Nancré, was a captain in the Royal Polish Cavalry. He married Marie-Louise-Aimée de Courcelles, with whom he had a son, Hyacinthe-Louis-Ernest, who was born in Paris in 1787. Hyacinthe-Louis-Ernest would go on to have a distinguished career in the French army, serving under both Napoléon and Louis XVIII. The Dreux-Nancré family came from Berry, France, and were cousins to the more well-known Dreux-Brézé family, with whom they were also related through marriage. Michel de Dreux-Brézé, Marquis de Dreux-Brézé (1700-1754), married his cousin, Isabelle de Dreux-Nancré, granddaughter of Claude de Dreux-Nancré.

The sitter is depicted full-length in the type of English-inspired clothing that had become fashionable in France in the 1790s as a way of self-consciously distancing oneself from the former ancien régime. Barthélémy Charles’s languid pose and distant gaze from within an enclosed, balustraded terrace bespeaks an effortless, informal disposition, the sense of which is enhanced by his overturned hat and the manner in which his coattail drapes nonchalantly over the terrace wall. Beyond can be seen a verdant Poitevin landscape with the ruins of the late-sixteenth-century Château de Mondon, with its prominent circular defensive tower surmounted by a dome on the structure’s southeast corner.

In recent decades, the painting has had two particularly notable owners. It was first acquired by then-Senator John F. Kennedy in the late 1950s as a present to his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The painting hung in their home in the Georgetown neighbourhood of Washington, D.C., before its installation in the family quarters of the White House following Kennedy’s inauguration as president in 1961. Kennedy retained possession of the painting for the rest of her life. At her 1996 estate sale, the painting was acquired by the polymath and entrepreneur Sam Josefowitz (1921-2015), one of the greatest collectors of the twentieth century. His extensive collection formed over six decades spanned more than two millennia of artistic creation, including antiquities, Southeast Asian and Japanese sculptures, Rembrandt prints and masterpieces by many of the leading European artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.