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Lot Essay
From soon after its reappearance at auction in 1981, Allegory of Peace and Abundance has been associated with a very large allegorical painting commissioned from François de Troy by the City of Paris in 1716 to commemorate the Peace of Utrecht, in which a series of international treaties negotiated by representatives of Louis XIV had brought to an end the devastating War of the Spanish Succession three years earlier. The City Council ordered the painting as a decoration for the Hôtel de Ville, to honour Louis XIV (who had died only a few months earlier) and its own members; it was to depict 'magistrates of the City of Paris complimenting the King on the Peace of Utrecht with the appropriate Ornaments and Allegories (for the Salledite des Colonels)' and de Troy was to be paid 6000 livres for the undertaking, which was to measure 6 pieds, 2 pouces by 17 pieds, 5 pouces (approximately 188 x 530 cm.). A sketch was prepared (now lost), but nothing further is known of the project, and no more detailed description of the composition survives. Indeed, Karen Serres (op.cit.) has noted that the painting went unmentioned in the numerous contemporary guides to Paris, and it would not be certain that it had ever been completed were it not for a single remark by Dezallier d'Argenville in his 'Life of François de Troy' (published in 1762) which refers to the artist's Promulgation of the Peace of Utrecht made for the Hôtel de Ville, a work that he said dated from 1719 and had, by the time of his writing, already been removed from the building.
It is probable that the Allegory of Peace and Abundance is an enormous fragment from de Troy's painting, the only surviving piece from the Hôtel de Ville composition. Although it is less than half the width that it would have been originally, its height is exactly as commissioned, indicating that it has not been reduced vertically. On the banks of the Seine, a single life-sized figure of a beautiful young woman combines the attributes of Peace and Abundance: dressed in white, with a crown of entwined olive branches in her hair, she lowers her flaming torch to set fire to a military drum and pieces of armour, indicating that an era of peace has begun; under her left arm she holds a cornucopia overflowing with the fruits of Abundance, which shower themselves upon the River God below. Above them, a flying figure of Fame announces the arrival in Paris of Peace and Abundance; across the river is visible the Ile de la Cité, Notre-Dame Cathedral, the palace of the Archbishop and the Pont du Double (the latter two monuments gone since the late 18th century). As the figures of Peace, Abundance and Fame, look resolutely to the left, we can presume that what remains of the original composition is the right-hand side; the missing left section would almost certainly have depicted the Provost and twelve city aldermen standing in front of the Hôtel de Ville, with Peace and Fame paying them homage. An oval area of repaint on the lower part of the stone column behind Peace might cover what had once been a representation of a sculpted bas-relief of the recently deceased king, as Christophe Leribault ingeniously hypothesized (op.cit.).
Although the commission was given to François de Troy, who almost certainly planned its design, it is obvious from looking at the surviving painting that the actual execution was handed over almost entirely to François's immensely talented son, Jean-François de Troy. Few of the great History painters of eighteenth-century France have a painting style as distinctive as that of the younger de Troy and, as Leribault has observed, the figures in the present painting are almost identical in conception and handling as those found in mythologies securely attributed to the young artist, such as the Apollo and Daphne in The Hermitage, St. Petersburg (Leribault P.80) and Pan and Syrinx in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (Leribault P.81). As Leribault notes, confusions have arisen over authorship of the various parts of the final commission given by the Ville de Paris to François de Troy in 1725, in which father and son were to once again collaborate. In any event, it is quite possible that François's hand would have been more evident in the now lost, left-side of the present 1716 composition, which would have consisted largely of portraiture, his principal speciality.
It is probable that the Allegory of Peace and Abundance is an enormous fragment from de Troy's painting, the only surviving piece from the Hôtel de Ville composition. Although it is less than half the width that it would have been originally, its height is exactly as commissioned, indicating that it has not been reduced vertically. On the banks of the Seine, a single life-sized figure of a beautiful young woman combines the attributes of Peace and Abundance: dressed in white, with a crown of entwined olive branches in her hair, she lowers her flaming torch to set fire to a military drum and pieces of armour, indicating that an era of peace has begun; under her left arm she holds a cornucopia overflowing with the fruits of Abundance, which shower themselves upon the River God below. Above them, a flying figure of Fame announces the arrival in Paris of Peace and Abundance; across the river is visible the Ile de la Cité, Notre-Dame Cathedral, the palace of the Archbishop and the Pont du Double (the latter two monuments gone since the late 18th century). As the figures of Peace, Abundance and Fame, look resolutely to the left, we can presume that what remains of the original composition is the right-hand side; the missing left section would almost certainly have depicted the Provost and twelve city aldermen standing in front of the Hôtel de Ville, with Peace and Fame paying them homage. An oval area of repaint on the lower part of the stone column behind Peace might cover what had once been a representation of a sculpted bas-relief of the recently deceased king, as Christophe Leribault ingeniously hypothesized (op.cit.).
Although the commission was given to François de Troy, who almost certainly planned its design, it is obvious from looking at the surviving painting that the actual execution was handed over almost entirely to François's immensely talented son, Jean-François de Troy. Few of the great History painters of eighteenth-century France have a painting style as distinctive as that of the younger de Troy and, as Leribault has observed, the figures in the present painting are almost identical in conception and handling as those found in mythologies securely attributed to the young artist, such as the Apollo and Daphne in The Hermitage, St. Petersburg (Leribault P.80) and Pan and Syrinx in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (Leribault P.81). As Leribault notes, confusions have arisen over authorship of the various parts of the final commission given by the Ville de Paris to François de Troy in 1725, in which father and son were to once again collaborate. In any event, it is quite possible that François's hand would have been more evident in the now lost, left-side of the present 1716 composition, which would have consisted largely of portraiture, his principal speciality.