Portrait of a young boy of the Caillot family; and Portrait of Augustine Catherine Caillot

This refined pair of pastel portraits of a young boy and girl were long considered the work of Jean-Baptiste Greuze, in part because they share an emotionally expressive sensibility associated with the ‘têtes d’expression’ that were popularized by Greuze, himself an accomplished pastellist. It was only in 1993 that Joseph Baillio, the leading authority on the works of Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, corrected this error and returned these pastels to their true author. Baillio recognized that in Vigée Le Brun’s own manuscript list of her works, under the year 1787, the artist recorded a portrait of the actor and singer Joseph Caillot in hunting costume (private collection), followed immediately by two portraits of Caillot’s children, which Baillio associated with the present pastels.

Joseph Caillot (1733-1816) was a friend of Vigée Le Brun who had made a great reputation for himself as a singer and comic actor at the Comédie-Italienne and later at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, celebrated for the wide range of his musical register, from baritone to tenor. In 1779, Caillot married Marie-Augustine ‘Blanchette' Saÿde, who gave birth the following year in Passy to the couple’s first child, Augustine-Catherine Caillot (1780-1858); their second child, Armand-Charles Caillot (1788-1813) was born eight years later. In 1785 Blanchette also had an illegitimate son, Théodore-Joseph, who died the following year. As Baillio recognized, there cannot be an eight-year age difference between the two children in Vigée Le Brun’s pastel portraits – and a portrait of Armand-Charles could not have been executed a year before he was born! – and so, while he identifies the present portrait of the girl as of Augustine-Catherine, he regards the portrait of the boy as depicting an unknown and as yet to be identified member of Caillot’s family. The portraits are first securely documented in the collection of Charles-Alexandre de Calonne (1734-1802), Louis XVI’s powerful Controller-General of Finances in the years leading up to the Revolution; the pair of pastels appears in the auction of Calonne’s properties held in London in 1795, lot 62.

Neil Jeffares fully endorses the attribution of the pastels to Vigée Le Brun and believes them probably to be the pendants in Calonne’s collection, but has raised doubts as to the sitters’ identities (loc. cit.). The scholar has noted that Vigée Le Brun’s manuscript list does not cite the medium of the portraits as pastel and lists them as depicting 'ses [Caillot’s] deux enfants' in 1787, when only one of Caillot’s recorded children – Augustine-Catherine – was alive (but if the reference is to Théodore-Joseph, he could not be the boy in the present work). Two copies of the pastels, signed by the pastellist Michel Rabillon (1735-1786), one apparently dated 1780, are known (Jeffares, op. cit., p. 7, nos. J.6078.112 and J.6078.113). Jeffares (who continues to index the works under Caillot) cannot exclude the possibility that the present pastels may, instead, be unrecorded portraits, perhaps even of members of Calonne’s own family, possibly his son, Charles-Louis-Henri de Calonne (1770-1808) and his niece, Marie-Anne-Charlotte de Valicourt (1774-1835), made by Vigée Le Brun around 1785 or slightly earlier.

Regardless of the sitters’ identities, Vigée Le Brun’s pastels are especially gentle and exquisitely refined examples of her work in the difficult medium of pastel, full of youthful wonder – as Baillio notes – and of the 'air d’ingénuité et d’innocence', that make them among the most beautiful and accomplished of the artist’s career.