拍品專文
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE:
Lami, S., Dictionnaire de Sculpteurs de L'cole Franaise au dix-huitime sicle, Paris, 1910, pp. 194-210;
D. Rosenfeld (ed.), European Painting and Sculpture, ca. 1770-1937, in the Museum of Art, Rhode Island, School of Design, Providence, R.I., 1991, pp. 17-19, no. 8 and frontispiece;
M. Rocher-Jauneau, 'Chinard,' in The Dictionary of Art, London, 1996, vol. 7, pp. 162-63, (Marble Bust of Mme. Rcamier in Lyon, illustrated);
P. Vitry, Exposition d'oeuvres du sculpteur Chinard de Lyon (1756-1813), exh. cat., Union centraee des Arts Dcoratifs, Pavillon de Marsau, (Palais du Louvre), Paris, 1909, pp. 16, 41-42, no. 58;
P. Laverack (ed.), Daniel Katz Ltd. 1968-1993, exh. cat., Daniel Katz Gallery, London, 1992, pp. 54-57 (marble bust, unsigned, sold to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts)
Daniel Rosenfeld writes (op. cit.):
"The sculptor Chinard, like the Rcamiers, was from Lyons - a son of a silk merchant - and also a product of the unpredictable events and opportunities brought on by the Revolution. He studied at the Ecole Royale de Dessin de Lyon and apprenticed in the studio of the Lyons sculptor Barthlmy Blaise. In 1784, a local patron, the chevalier de La Font de Juis, provided the funds that enabled Chinard to travel to Rome, where he remained until 1787. Returning to Rome in 1791, he was arrested for supposed revolutionary and anticlerical sentiments expressed in his work. He was eventually released from prison (and expelled from Rome) through the intervention of the painter David before the Convention, and of the minister of the interior, Roland, who appealed directly to the Pope. Back in Lyons in 1792, he was imprisoned yet again, this time because of counterrevolutionary sentiments that were perceived in his statue of Liberty created for the facade of the Htel de Ville in Lyons. He was acquitted in 1794 and continued to devote much of his time and talent to the ideals of the Revolution: like David in Paris, he designed the grand republican ftes that were celebrated in Lyons. Throughout the course of the Revolution and Empire he created numerous busts and medallions of patriots, members of the Convention, generals, and assorted members of Napoleon's court."
As Rocher-Jouneau (op. cit) writes:
"Chinard was often swayed by the pressure of political and stylistic fashion in his decorative and monumental sculptures, which vary between the alexandrine grace of Apollo Trampling Superstition, which is reminiscent of the work of the 18th century, and the impersonal Neoclassicism of his seated statue of the Republic (terracotta model, 1794; Paris, Louvre). In his portraits, on the other hand, he made no concessions either to the tastes of his patrons or to fashion, employing a sensitive and very personal realism. It is this remarkable gallery of portraits that earns him a place among the masters of French sculpture."
Rosenfeld continues:
"Juliette Rcamier (ne Jeanne-Franoise-Julie-Adlade Bernard, 1777-1849) was one of the most fashionable and beautiful women in Napoleonic France, and one of the more interesting personalities of a society that rose out of the turmoil of the Revolution. She was the daughter of a Lyonnais notary who moved to Paris in 1784 on becoming a Receveur des finances to Louis XVI. In April 1793, at the height of the Terror, three months after the execution of the King, she married Jacques-Rose Rcamier, a wealthy banker-financier, who was also originally from Lyons. Juliette was only fifteen years old at the time; her new husband was forty-three. The bonds uniting them, according to her niece and adopted daughter, were of a strictly paternal character. [Jacques Rcamier] treated the young and innocent girl who bore his name, like a daughter whose beauty charmed his eyes, and whose celebrity flattered his vanity.' It has been suggested that M. Rcamier was in fact the young girl's biological father, who, fearing the guillotine, married his daughter to secure his fortune to her."
"Aided by her considerable beauty, her husband's great wealth, and a charming and ingratiating character, Madame Rcamier became one of the most sought-after women in turn-of-the-century Paris, in spite of her matrimonial status. Her appearances in public during the Directory ignited a stir among the crowds, who jostled to get a look at her. In her physical appearance she embodied the then-fashionable Neoclassical taste: her coiffure was inspired by ancient Roman frescoes; she wore only white, flowing garments 'in the Antique manner,' as she is pictured in portraits by David (1800, Paris Muse du Louvre) and Grard (1805, Paris, Muse Carnavalet). Her suitors are said to have 'burned for her with the most ardent but least rewarded passion,' earning her the reputation of a 'coquette,' something of which is suggested by Chinard's portrait, as by Grard's painting of her."
"Chinard probably met the Rcamiers for the first time in 1795, when he came to Paris to be admitted as a member of the Institut de France. It was during this visit that he is believed to have executed his first bust of the then seventeen-year-old-girl (21cm. high; formerly in the Penha-Longa Collection). This youthful portrait, its sweetness reflecting the survival of Rococo influences in Chinard's Neoclassical art, represents the young girl with her head declined toward her right, her hair in a Greek turban, her torso wrapped in a semi-transparent shawl that falls to expose her left shoulder and breast, despite her effort to hold it together with her hands."
A larger, life-size, version - similar to the present one, featuring notable variations in the hairstyle and drapery - is in the J. Paul Getty Museum [88.SC.42]. The new image was considerably more sensuous and coquettish in character. This is the image by which Juliette has become immortalized and is frequently reproduced in connection with the history of French art around 1800. As has been eloquently written of the Getty terracotta (Journal of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, CA, 1989, New Acquisitions, no. 92):
"Chinard was the leading French Empire sculptor and, after Canova, the favored sculptor of Napoleon and the Bonaparte family. As a portraitist Chinard was particularly innovative in dealing with the formal problems of truncation in portrait busts by employing contemporary high-fashion accessories to unify the bust and its socle. In the case of Mme. Rcamier, the inclusion of the sitter's arms and hands, holding diaphanous drapery, enhance her provocative beauty by their ambiguous action of covering up while at the same time revealing her breast. The drapery ensures the success of this daring truncation by flowing into the socle and uniting it with the bust. This and other details, such as the half-hidden bracelet and the intricately folded head wrap, lend the bust a freshness that makes Chinard's brand of classicized portraiture unique."
Around 1805, Chinard was living in the Rcamier's house in Paris. A second marble bust was still in the sculptor's possession in 1812, when Mme. Rcamier was exiled from Paris by Napoleon, for she wrote from her native city of Lyons to him on 15 October that she was in no position to pay him for it, as she possessed the first one still in her house in Paris:
"Mad. Chinard a bien voulu, monsieur, m'apporter elle-mme votre lettre, et j'ai t charme de cette occasion de la connatre. --Le buste dont vous me parlez ne pouvait avoir d'autre prix pour moi que celui que lui donne votre talent, et l'admiration que j'ai pour vos charmants ouvrages m'avait fait souhaiter de pouvoir le garder. Mais vous comprenez que dans la situation triste et incertaine dans laquelle je me trouve, je ne puis le faire venir ni l'envoyer dans ma famille Paris o se trouve dj un buste en marbre pareil celui dont vous me parlez. Du reste je vais envoyer votre lettre Mr. Rcamier qui voudra bien en dcider et s'unir moi pour vous remercier de vos aimables intentions. Je garde l'esprance de vous revoir Lyon cet hiver et je m'en fais un vrai plaisir."
Juliette did not claim this second marble bust until 1814, after the sculptor's death in 1813 and her own return to Paris (now in the Museum of Art in the Rhode Island School of Design; gift of Mrs. Harold Brown, 37.201). Rosenfeld writes that: "It descended directly from Madame Rcamier to her adopted daughter, Madame Lenormant, and then appeared in public auction in 1893. Unlike its companion in Lyons, it is lacking the arms and falling drapery that exposes the sitter's breast. It has been the conventional understanding, originating from Madame Lenormant, that the unique truncated version was 'edited' by Madame Rcamier late in her life and long after Chinard's death, when she apparently had second thoughts about its propriety. She is believed to have employed an unknown sculptor to remove the lower portion of the sculpture; he then placed a new signature on its base. By removing the lower bust, the psychological complexity, eroticism, and animation of the figure are replaced by a view of the subject more solemn and withdrawn than the sculptor may have originally intended. It remains one of Chinard's greatest accomplishments and one of the most distinctive portraits of the era. Even in its edited form, it reveals a synthesis of idealization and sensuality, of repose and animation, combining a fashion for antiquity with the lingering fleshiness of late-Rococo art. Chinard has suggested something of the beauty and charm that attracted so many people to Madame Rcamier. He has also conveyed the rich ambiguity of this legendary personality, who could be simultaneously seductive and aloof, arousing and yet inaccessible."
A letter from Chinard mentions that another version of the bust was exhibited in the Salon either of the year VII (1801) or IX (1802) of the Revolutionary calendar. According to the livret Chinard did not exhibit in those Salons, although the Salon of the year X (1803) lists "plusieurs bustes."
The provenances of the present bust and an unsigned one in the J. Paul Getty Museum are not known, but they are probably among the three terracottas in private hands listed earlier this century by Lami (op. cit., p. 210) and Vitry (op. cit., p. 42):
a) Formerly collection of Mr. Cahen, Antwerp (exhibited Galerie G. Petit, Paris, December 1883; and again the Chinard exhibition of 1909, no. 58).
b) Formerly Mr. Lefbvre, chteau of Valmer (Indre-et-Loire, France)
c) Formerly Mr. Gaston Berheim (formerly Mme. Lucy Hessel), exhibited at the Grand Palais, Paris, 1900.
Further good versions of the portrait carved in marble are in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and in the state Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (lately Leningrad) Russia, as well as in the Barber Institute of Arts, University of Birmingham (England).
Lami, S., Dictionnaire de Sculpteurs de L'cole Franaise au dix-huitime sicle, Paris, 1910, pp. 194-210;
D. Rosenfeld (ed.), European Painting and Sculpture, ca. 1770-1937, in the Museum of Art, Rhode Island, School of Design, Providence, R.I., 1991, pp. 17-19, no. 8 and frontispiece;
M. Rocher-Jauneau, 'Chinard,' in The Dictionary of Art, London, 1996, vol. 7, pp. 162-63, (Marble Bust of Mme. Rcamier in Lyon, illustrated);
P. Vitry, Exposition d'oeuvres du sculpteur Chinard de Lyon (1756-1813), exh. cat., Union centraee des Arts Dcoratifs, Pavillon de Marsau, (Palais du Louvre), Paris, 1909, pp. 16, 41-42, no. 58;
P. Laverack (ed.), Daniel Katz Ltd. 1968-1993, exh. cat., Daniel Katz Gallery, London, 1992, pp. 54-57 (marble bust, unsigned, sold to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts)
Daniel Rosenfeld writes (op. cit.):
"The sculptor Chinard, like the Rcamiers, was from Lyons - a son of a silk merchant - and also a product of the unpredictable events and opportunities brought on by the Revolution. He studied at the Ecole Royale de Dessin de Lyon and apprenticed in the studio of the Lyons sculptor Barthlmy Blaise. In 1784, a local patron, the chevalier de La Font de Juis, provided the funds that enabled Chinard to travel to Rome, where he remained until 1787. Returning to Rome in 1791, he was arrested for supposed revolutionary and anticlerical sentiments expressed in his work. He was eventually released from prison (and expelled from Rome) through the intervention of the painter David before the Convention, and of the minister of the interior, Roland, who appealed directly to the Pope. Back in Lyons in 1792, he was imprisoned yet again, this time because of counterrevolutionary sentiments that were perceived in his statue of Liberty created for the facade of the Htel de Ville in Lyons. He was acquitted in 1794 and continued to devote much of his time and talent to the ideals of the Revolution: like David in Paris, he designed the grand republican ftes that were celebrated in Lyons. Throughout the course of the Revolution and Empire he created numerous busts and medallions of patriots, members of the Convention, generals, and assorted members of Napoleon's court."
As Rocher-Jouneau (op. cit) writes:
"Chinard was often swayed by the pressure of political and stylistic fashion in his decorative and monumental sculptures, which vary between the alexandrine grace of Apollo Trampling Superstition, which is reminiscent of the work of the 18th century, and the impersonal Neoclassicism of his seated statue of the Republic (terracotta model, 1794; Paris, Louvre). In his portraits, on the other hand, he made no concessions either to the tastes of his patrons or to fashion, employing a sensitive and very personal realism. It is this remarkable gallery of portraits that earns him a place among the masters of French sculpture."
Rosenfeld continues:
"Juliette Rcamier (ne Jeanne-Franoise-Julie-Adlade Bernard, 1777-1849) was one of the most fashionable and beautiful women in Napoleonic France, and one of the more interesting personalities of a society that rose out of the turmoil of the Revolution. She was the daughter of a Lyonnais notary who moved to Paris in 1784 on becoming a Receveur des finances to Louis XVI. In April 1793, at the height of the Terror, three months after the execution of the King, she married Jacques-Rose Rcamier, a wealthy banker-financier, who was also originally from Lyons. Juliette was only fifteen years old at the time; her new husband was forty-three. The bonds uniting them, according to her niece and adopted daughter, were of a strictly paternal character. [Jacques Rcamier] treated the young and innocent girl who bore his name, like a daughter whose beauty charmed his eyes, and whose celebrity flattered his vanity.' It has been suggested that M. Rcamier was in fact the young girl's biological father, who, fearing the guillotine, married his daughter to secure his fortune to her."
"Aided by her considerable beauty, her husband's great wealth, and a charming and ingratiating character, Madame Rcamier became one of the most sought-after women in turn-of-the-century Paris, in spite of her matrimonial status. Her appearances in public during the Directory ignited a stir among the crowds, who jostled to get a look at her. In her physical appearance she embodied the then-fashionable Neoclassical taste: her coiffure was inspired by ancient Roman frescoes; she wore only white, flowing garments 'in the Antique manner,' as she is pictured in portraits by David (1800, Paris Muse du Louvre) and Grard (1805, Paris, Muse Carnavalet). Her suitors are said to have 'burned for her with the most ardent but least rewarded passion,' earning her the reputation of a 'coquette,' something of which is suggested by Chinard's portrait, as by Grard's painting of her."
"Chinard probably met the Rcamiers for the first time in 1795, when he came to Paris to be admitted as a member of the Institut de France. It was during this visit that he is believed to have executed his first bust of the then seventeen-year-old-girl (21cm. high; formerly in the Penha-Longa Collection). This youthful portrait, its sweetness reflecting the survival of Rococo influences in Chinard's Neoclassical art, represents the young girl with her head declined toward her right, her hair in a Greek turban, her torso wrapped in a semi-transparent shawl that falls to expose her left shoulder and breast, despite her effort to hold it together with her hands."
A larger, life-size, version - similar to the present one, featuring notable variations in the hairstyle and drapery - is in the J. Paul Getty Museum [88.SC.42]. The new image was considerably more sensuous and coquettish in character. This is the image by which Juliette has become immortalized and is frequently reproduced in connection with the history of French art around 1800. As has been eloquently written of the Getty terracotta (Journal of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, CA, 1989, New Acquisitions, no. 92):
"Chinard was the leading French Empire sculptor and, after Canova, the favored sculptor of Napoleon and the Bonaparte family. As a portraitist Chinard was particularly innovative in dealing with the formal problems of truncation in portrait busts by employing contemporary high-fashion accessories to unify the bust and its socle. In the case of Mme. Rcamier, the inclusion of the sitter's arms and hands, holding diaphanous drapery, enhance her provocative beauty by their ambiguous action of covering up while at the same time revealing her breast. The drapery ensures the success of this daring truncation by flowing into the socle and uniting it with the bust. This and other details, such as the half-hidden bracelet and the intricately folded head wrap, lend the bust a freshness that makes Chinard's brand of classicized portraiture unique."
Around 1805, Chinard was living in the Rcamier's house in Paris. A second marble bust was still in the sculptor's possession in 1812, when Mme. Rcamier was exiled from Paris by Napoleon, for she wrote from her native city of Lyons to him on 15 October that she was in no position to pay him for it, as she possessed the first one still in her house in Paris:
"Mad. Chinard a bien voulu, monsieur, m'apporter elle-mme votre lettre, et j'ai t charme de cette occasion de la connatre. --Le buste dont vous me parlez ne pouvait avoir d'autre prix pour moi que celui que lui donne votre talent, et l'admiration que j'ai pour vos charmants ouvrages m'avait fait souhaiter de pouvoir le garder. Mais vous comprenez que dans la situation triste et incertaine dans laquelle je me trouve, je ne puis le faire venir ni l'envoyer dans ma famille Paris o se trouve dj un buste en marbre pareil celui dont vous me parlez. Du reste je vais envoyer votre lettre Mr. Rcamier qui voudra bien en dcider et s'unir moi pour vous remercier de vos aimables intentions. Je garde l'esprance de vous revoir Lyon cet hiver et je m'en fais un vrai plaisir."
Juliette did not claim this second marble bust until 1814, after the sculptor's death in 1813 and her own return to Paris (now in the Museum of Art in the Rhode Island School of Design; gift of Mrs. Harold Brown, 37.201). Rosenfeld writes that: "It descended directly from Madame Rcamier to her adopted daughter, Madame Lenormant, and then appeared in public auction in 1893. Unlike its companion in Lyons, it is lacking the arms and falling drapery that exposes the sitter's breast. It has been the conventional understanding, originating from Madame Lenormant, that the unique truncated version was 'edited' by Madame Rcamier late in her life and long after Chinard's death, when she apparently had second thoughts about its propriety. She is believed to have employed an unknown sculptor to remove the lower portion of the sculpture; he then placed a new signature on its base. By removing the lower bust, the psychological complexity, eroticism, and animation of the figure are replaced by a view of the subject more solemn and withdrawn than the sculptor may have originally intended. It remains one of Chinard's greatest accomplishments and one of the most distinctive portraits of the era. Even in its edited form, it reveals a synthesis of idealization and sensuality, of repose and animation, combining a fashion for antiquity with the lingering fleshiness of late-Rococo art. Chinard has suggested something of the beauty and charm that attracted so many people to Madame Rcamier. He has also conveyed the rich ambiguity of this legendary personality, who could be simultaneously seductive and aloof, arousing and yet inaccessible."
A letter from Chinard mentions that another version of the bust was exhibited in the Salon either of the year VII (1801) or IX (1802) of the Revolutionary calendar. According to the livret Chinard did not exhibit in those Salons, although the Salon of the year X (1803) lists "plusieurs bustes."
The provenances of the present bust and an unsigned one in the J. Paul Getty Museum are not known, but they are probably among the three terracottas in private hands listed earlier this century by Lami (op. cit., p. 210) and Vitry (op. cit., p. 42):
a) Formerly collection of Mr. Cahen, Antwerp (exhibited Galerie G. Petit, Paris, December 1883; and again the Chinard exhibition of 1909, no. 58).
b) Formerly Mr. Lefbvre, chteau of Valmer (Indre-et-Loire, France)
c) Formerly Mr. Gaston Berheim (formerly Mme. Lucy Hessel), exhibited at the Grand Palais, Paris, 1900.
Further good versions of the portrait carved in marble are in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and in the state Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (lately Leningrad) Russia, as well as in the Barber Institute of Arts, University of Birmingham (England).