DECORATIVE PANELS WITH RELIEFS OF CHERUBS SET INTO FEIGNED ARCHITECTURAL NICHES SURROUNDED BY SCROLLING FOLIAGE AND ARABESQUES WITH MERMAIDS AND NYMPHS

Jules-Hugues Rousseau, the elder and Jean-Siméon Rousseau, so-called Rousseau de la Rottière, were the son and grandson of artists who had worked at the Royal châteaux de Versailles, Bellevue, Saint-Cloud, Chambord, Choisy, Compiègne, Marly, Fontainebleau and Meudon. With such Royal patronage, the Rousseau family were a natural choice for the comte d'Artois. These whimsical arabesque panels reflect the direct influence of the comte d'Artois' cabinet Turc at Versailles, executed from April to November 1781 and now divided between the musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris and Versailles. These in turn had grown out of the arabesques commisioned by the comte d'Artois for his Pavillon de Bagatelle, designed by the architect François-Joseph Bélanger and constructed in 1777 in just nine weeks, the result of a 100,000 livres wager between the comte d'Artois, youngest brother of Louis XVI, and Marie-Antoinette. Conceived as a pleasure palace in the "antique" taste, its arabesques of closely related sentiment are discussed in "La Folie d'Artois", Exhibition Catalogue, 1988, pp.87-142.

For the attribution, compare the series of panels by the Frères Rousseau from the hôtel Hosten (now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu) and also those painted for the hôtel Megret de Serilly, and now in the Jones Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Research in the Lévis-Mirepoix inventories in the archives Nationales, Paris, has frustratingly shed no light on this remarkable series of grotesques. However, the Maréchal de Mirepoix was a considerable collector in the late 18th Century, having an hôtel in the rue d'Artois until 1785, when it was sold to the Maréchal de Choiseul-Stainville.