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Lot Essay
The rediscovery of this important work, heretofore thought to have been lost since the 18th-century, makes a significant addition to the corpus of Charles Coypel's surviving paintings; uncertainties about its provenance remain, however. It appears to be the picture entitled Une Bohémienne in the 1764 catalogue of the celebrated encyclopedic collection of contemporary French paintings assembled by La Live de Jully, as Thierry Lefranois -- Coypel's most authoritative modern biographer -- has confirmed. The present painting matches Mariette's catalogue description to the letter:
'A painting by Charles Coypel, painted on canvas, measuring 2 feet 6 pouce and a half in height by 2 feet wide, representing a young man having his fortune told by a young bohemian woman. This painting is spirited; the head of the woman is fine and has a most agreeable expression'.
Despite a later inscription at the bottom of the canvas identifying the artist as Carle Vanloo, the painting is executed in Charles Coypel's distinctive and easily identifiable manner, and a beautiful, unpublished study by Coypel in trois crayons for the fortune teller's head is in a New York private collection.
However, when La Live de Jully's collection was auctioned in 1770, the sale catalogue -- written by the distinguished expert Pierre Rémy -- described Coypel's painting as having an additional feature not mentioned in Mariette's entry: between the fortune teller and her client, Rémy noted, was the 'head of a Negro'. Interestingly, a version of the composition including the negro's head was sold in Paris in 1931, attributed to the 'Atelier of Carle Vanloo' (Hôtel Drouot, salle 1, 1 June 1931, lot 55); although the painting was much too feeble to be by Charles Coypel himself, Pierre Rosenberg recognized the composition to be Coypel's in a handwritten note on the photo mount in the Witt Library, London.
Whether or not the present painting was indeed that belonging to La Live de Jully, it is certainly a fully autograph version of a subject which had long interested Coypel: indeed, the first etching the prodigious young artist ever made -- in 1706, at the age of 12 -- depicted 'la diseuse de bonne aventure' (see Lefranois, op. cit, no. G1).
We are grateful to Thierry Lefranois for confirming the attribution to Coypel.
'A painting by Charles Coypel, painted on canvas, measuring 2 feet 6 pouce and a half in height by 2 feet wide, representing a young man having his fortune told by a young bohemian woman. This painting is spirited; the head of the woman is fine and has a most agreeable expression'.
Despite a later inscription at the bottom of the canvas identifying the artist as Carle Vanloo, the painting is executed in Charles Coypel's distinctive and easily identifiable manner, and a beautiful, unpublished study by Coypel in trois crayons for the fortune teller's head is in a New York private collection.
However, when La Live de Jully's collection was auctioned in 1770, the sale catalogue -- written by the distinguished expert Pierre Rémy -- described Coypel's painting as having an additional feature not mentioned in Mariette's entry: between the fortune teller and her client, Rémy noted, was the 'head of a Negro'. Interestingly, a version of the composition including the negro's head was sold in Paris in 1931, attributed to the 'Atelier of Carle Vanloo' (Hôtel Drouot, salle 1, 1 June 1931, lot 55); although the painting was much too feeble to be by Charles Coypel himself, Pierre Rosenberg recognized the composition to be Coypel's in a handwritten note on the photo mount in the Witt Library, London.
Whether or not the present painting was indeed that belonging to La Live de Jully, it is certainly a fully autograph version of a subject which had long interested Coypel: indeed, the first etching the prodigious young artist ever made -- in 1706, at the age of 12 -- depicted 'la diseuse de bonne aventure' (see Lefranois, op. cit, no. G1).
We are grateful to Thierry Lefranois for confirming the attribution to Coypel.