Portrait of Pierre-Jacques Bergeret de Grancourt (1742-1807), bust-length

Details

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (Grasse 1732-1806 Paris)
Portrait of Pierre-Jacques Bergeret de Grancourt (1742-1807), bust-length
black chalk, circular
6 in. diam. (15.2 cm.)

Provenance

Georges Haumont, Paris, by 1935; Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 21 January, 1970, lot 2.
with Galerie Pardo, Paris; from whom purchased by the late owners, 1981.

Literature

A. Ananoff, L'Œuvre dessiné de Fragonard, I, Paris, 1961, no. 126, Addenda, IV, Paris, 1970, no. 126, fig. 688, ill.
F. Soulier-François, Fragonard et le voyage en Italie, 1773-1774. Les Bergeret, une famille de mécènes, exhib. cat., L'Isle-Adam, Musée d'Art et d'Histoire Louis-Senlecq, 2002, p. 70.
P. Rosenberg, Les Fragonard de Besançon, exhib. cat., Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'Archéologie, 2007, under no. 96, fig. 97a.

Exhibited

Paris, Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Le dessin français dans les collections du XVIIIe siècle, 1935, no. 254 (catalogue by G.W. Lundberg, G. Wildenstein and H. Focillon).
Copenhagen, Charlottenborg Palace, L'Art français au XVIIIe siècle, 1935, no. 371.

Special notice

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Lot Essay

This portrait depicts the son of the better-known fermier général Pierre-Jacques-Onésyme Bergeret de Grancourt (1715-1785), patron, collector and close friend of Fragonard, with whom he travelled through Italy in 1773-1774. The artist also had the habit of visiting the Bergeret family’s country estate of Cassan near L’Isle-Adam, where his only daughter, Rosalie, died prematurely in 1788. Another circular portrait of Bergeret fils is in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Besançon (inv. D. 2874; see exhib. cat., Besançon, 2007, op. cit., no. 96); it belongs to a group of seven sheets from the collection Huot-Fragonard and that of Camille Groult, bequeathed in 1986 to the Louvre, including, among others, three self-portraits, a portrait of Fragonard’s wife, of Rosalie, of his son Alexandre-Evariste, and of Marguerite Gérard (Fragonard, exhib. cat., Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, and New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987-1988, nos. 287-289, 292-294, 296, ill.).

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