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Lot Essay
Charles Coypel was born into a revered dynasty of French painters, the son of Antoine Coypel (1661-1722), nephew of Noël-Nicolas Coypel (1690-1734) and grandson of Noël Coypel (1628-1707), history painters all. Something of a prodigy, he was accepted into the Académie Royale aged 21 and achieved the highest levels of official success when he was appointed First Painter to the King and Director of the Académie in 1747. Curious, highly intelligent and independently wealthy, Coypel was able to follow his interests where they led. He was also a man of the theatre, a critic and author of some 40 plays – mostly three-act comedies and farces – which he regularly staged and directed, often casting himself in leading roles. His theatrical experience had a pronounced effect on his painting, in which he made ever greater efforts to capture the wide range of emotions, gestures and expressions typical of the stage.
In addition to his many paintings of subjects from Roman history and Greek mythology, Coypel depicted witty genre scenes, and was a superb and unconventional portraitist of considerable renown. As is evident in the present Portrait of a Man, certain lessons from his stage career came to inform his painted and pastel portraits – his flair for capturing a striking pose; direct and commanding expressions that grab the viewer’s attention; and witty and unexpected gestures that serve to break ‘the fourth wall’. Here, a handsome young man locks his compelling gaze directly on the viewer; the strongly lit right-side of his face and powerful turn of his left shoulder seeming to almost push beyond the constricted space of the composition, and – in a brilliant bit of trompe-l’oeil – his right hand and lace cuff entirely break free of the picture plane and its painted frame into the viewer’s space. Holding an artist’s tool with a paintbrush on one end and a pen nib on the other, he points to an inscription on the painted frame containing the artist’s signature and the date of the painting.
Coypel employed similarly brilliant trompe-l’oeil effects in several other portraits of the 1730s, most memorably in a pair of grand and opulent depictions of Jacques-Andre Dupillé, reçeveur général des finances of Lyon, and his wife and daughter (1733; both, The Resnick Collection, Beverly Hills). In the portrait of Dupillé, he is shown peering over the ledge of an opera box as he gestures to his right, directing our attention to the accompanying portrait of his wife and daughter. The women appear at a similar trompe-l’oeil casement and gesture welcomingly to us. Both are sumptuously costumed for a masked ball. The vivid sense of arrested animation projected by the portraits is highly theatrical and, until the recent identification of the sitters, it was sometimes assumed they were actors.
So arrestingly informal, direct and intimate, the present portrait has been identified in the recent past as a self-portrait, a mistake easily understood. The sitter holds an artist’s tool, strongly suggesting that he is himself a painter, and he points it toward Charles Coypel’s signature. Furthermore, the date inscribed beside the signature appears to read ‘1731’ – although the last digit is somewhat abraded – and a lost self-portrait in oils by Coypel, known to have been dated 1731, is recorded (see T. Lefrançois, Charles Coypel 1694-1752, Paris, 1994, p. 136, no. L.3). However, Coypel reveled in depicting himself, creating more than a dozen self-portraits in oils, chalks, and pastel. A magnificently swagger pastel self-portrait, today in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, leaves no doubt about his own distinctive appearance: a long, narrow face with a long, thin nose and deeply shadowed brown eyes, in striking contrast to the oval face, full cheekbones, broad-bridged nose and sparkling blue eyes of the present sitter.
While our sitter has yet to be named, the artist’s estate sale held on 27 March 1753 contained a number of portraits which might yet disclose clues to his identity. Even unknown, his portrait remains one of Coypel’s most surprising and delightful exercises in the genre.
Our thanks to Esther Bell for confirming the attribution to Coypel and correcting its previous identification as a self-portrait of the artist.
In addition to his many paintings of subjects from Roman history and Greek mythology, Coypel depicted witty genre scenes, and was a superb and unconventional portraitist of considerable renown. As is evident in the present Portrait of a Man, certain lessons from his stage career came to inform his painted and pastel portraits – his flair for capturing a striking pose; direct and commanding expressions that grab the viewer’s attention; and witty and unexpected gestures that serve to break ‘the fourth wall’. Here, a handsome young man locks his compelling gaze directly on the viewer; the strongly lit right-side of his face and powerful turn of his left shoulder seeming to almost push beyond the constricted space of the composition, and – in a brilliant bit of trompe-l’oeil – his right hand and lace cuff entirely break free of the picture plane and its painted frame into the viewer’s space. Holding an artist’s tool with a paintbrush on one end and a pen nib on the other, he points to an inscription on the painted frame containing the artist’s signature and the date of the painting.
Coypel employed similarly brilliant trompe-l’oeil effects in several other portraits of the 1730s, most memorably in a pair of grand and opulent depictions of Jacques-Andre Dupillé, reçeveur général des finances of Lyon, and his wife and daughter (1733; both, The Resnick Collection, Beverly Hills). In the portrait of Dupillé, he is shown peering over the ledge of an opera box as he gestures to his right, directing our attention to the accompanying portrait of his wife and daughter. The women appear at a similar trompe-l’oeil casement and gesture welcomingly to us. Both are sumptuously costumed for a masked ball. The vivid sense of arrested animation projected by the portraits is highly theatrical and, until the recent identification of the sitters, it was sometimes assumed they were actors.
So arrestingly informal, direct and intimate, the present portrait has been identified in the recent past as a self-portrait, a mistake easily understood. The sitter holds an artist’s tool, strongly suggesting that he is himself a painter, and he points it toward Charles Coypel’s signature. Furthermore, the date inscribed beside the signature appears to read ‘1731’ – although the last digit is somewhat abraded – and a lost self-portrait in oils by Coypel, known to have been dated 1731, is recorded (see T. Lefrançois, Charles Coypel 1694-1752, Paris, 1994, p. 136, no. L.3). However, Coypel reveled in depicting himself, creating more than a dozen self-portraits in oils, chalks, and pastel. A magnificently swagger pastel self-portrait, today in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, leaves no doubt about his own distinctive appearance: a long, narrow face with a long, thin nose and deeply shadowed brown eyes, in striking contrast to the oval face, full cheekbones, broad-bridged nose and sparkling blue eyes of the present sitter.
While our sitter has yet to be named, the artist’s estate sale held on 27 March 1753 contained a number of portraits which might yet disclose clues to his identity. Even unknown, his portrait remains one of Coypel’s most surprising and delightful exercises in the genre.
Our thanks to Esther Bell for confirming the attribution to Coypel and correcting its previous identification as a self-portrait of the artist.