Portrait of the Comte de Cromot, Grand Surintendant to the Comte de Provence, seated at an easel, accompanied by his two daughters-in-law

Antoine-François Callet, who won the Prix de Rome in 1764 and became a full member of the Académie Royale in 1777, devoted much of his career to the painting of grand manner history paintings, mythologies and allegorical decorations, initially in the nascent neoclassic manner of François-Guillaume Ménageot and François-André Vincent and later, after 1800, to vast and increasingly retardataire allegorical tributes to Napoleon’s military triumphs, such as the Allegory of the Battle of Austerlitz (Salon of 1812; Versailles), that were much to the Emperor’s taste. However, he was most admired and remains best remembered as a superb portraitist. By far his most famous portrait is the magnificent, full-length, standing portrait of King Louis XVI in Coronation robes (1778) which exists in many replicas and versions produced by Callet and his workshop, one of which was exhibited at the Salon of 1789, on the very eve of the Revolution. As official painter to the King, First Painter to ‘Monsieur’ and official painter to the Comte d’Artois, Callet received the patronage and protection of the monarch and both of his brothers.

The present portrait, of the Baron Cromot du Bourg seated at his easel, accompanied by his two daughters-in-law, is a masterpiece of late Ancien Régime portraiture. Signed and dated 1787, the portrait takes as its principal subject Jules-David Cromot du Bourg (1725-1786), Baron du Bourg. Born in Avallon (Yonne) in 1725, the eldest of thirteen children, he rose to become one of most powerful figures in the worlds of art and finance in France in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Following a long-established acquaintance with Louis Stanislas Xavier, Comte de Provence (1755-1824), grandson of Louis XV, brother of Louis XVI and himself the future King Louis XVIII, Jules-David Cromot was appointed ‘Surintendant des Finances et Bâtiments de Monsieur’ in 1771. The appointment followed immediately upon the fifteenth birthday of Louis Stanislas, when his education was complete and he was permitted to establish his own household. Cromot’s position at the court of ‘Monsieur’ – the honorary title given the Comte de Provence as eldest brother of the king – granted him vast powers over financial policy, building construction, promotion and administration of the fine arts and manufacturing, even garden design, under the patronage of the king’s brother. It was a position he would hold until his death fifteen years later, age 62.

The Baron du Bourg married Rose-Josèphe-Sophie Baudon (1729-1820) in 1751, and the couple had two sons. The eldest, Marie-François-Joseph-Maxime du Bourg (1756-1836), became a French officer in the Dragoons of the Comte de Provence in 1770 and later a hero of the Siege of Yorktown in 1781, where he served with French Lt. General Rochambeau in the Continental Army under the command of George Washington. His younger brother, Anne-David Cromot de Fougy (1760-1845), the Comte de Fougy, would go on to succeed his father as Superintendent of Finances and Buildings for Monsieur upon his father’s death, a role in which he remained until 1790.

Callet’s grand full-length is a posthumous portrait of the Baron du Bourg, completed in the year following his death. Seated in an elegant high-ceilinged room decorated with neoclassical boiserie, dressed in an ivory-colored silk robe, pants and leather slippers, the Baron holds a palette, mahl stick and paint brushes. To his right is a wooden easel on which rests a landscape that he has, presumably, just turned away from working on. He turns his head to his left, toward two young women standing behind him, who hug one another as they look upon him. One of the young women holds an open book, the other unfurls a red-chalk landscape drawing which might be the inspiration for the painting the Baron is executing. The landscape, in the style of Berchem or another seventeenth-century Dutch landscapist, is painted on a separate canvas that has been attached to the painting and, as proposed by Dr. Brigitte Gallini (whose doctoral thesis is a catalogue raisonné of Callet’s paintings and drawings), is likely by Cromot himself, who was known to have been an ardent amateur artist and copiest. His dedication to the arts was, presumably, Callet’s inspiration for portraying the powerful government minister as an artist himself, and to have made a touching tribute to this passion with the inclusion of one of his own amateur efforts.

Hanging on the wall behind the Baron is a portrait of the Comte de Provence, his patron and that of Callet as well. (The crown had commissioned Callet to make portraits of the king’s brother earlier in the 1780s.) Inscribed on the oval frame are the words ‘Donné par Mr. frère du Roi au grand Surintenant de ses Finances’, an acknowledgment of Monsieur’s debt to his recently deceased, devoted servant. The lively, elegantly coiffed and beautifully dressed young women represent the wives of the Baron’s two sons, Marie-François and Anne-David. A lovely half-length portrait of Anne-David’s wife, the former Guillaudieu de Plessis, painted in 1786 by Antoine Vestier (who was himself a long-standing recipient of the Baron’s patronage), is in the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena; it permits us to clearly identify her as the younger woman with the red ribbon in her hair in Callet’s painting. Several other portraits of the Baron are known, including a bust-length copy of a lost original by Callet (sold Artcurial, Paris, 15 February 2022, lot 45), and a spectacular portrait bust in marble by Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne II (1704-1778) in the National Gallery of Art, Washington; despite its depicting the Baron du Bourg 20 years earlier (1757), Lemoyne’s sculpture captures the same, distinctive features and cheerful expression that we see again in Callet’s masterpiece.