Portrait of the architect Jean-Rodolphe Perronet (1708-1794) and his wife, seated at a table with architectural models, a sketch

Alexandre Roslin was among the most successful portraitists in 18th-century Europe. Born in Malmö, the son of a naval physician, he moved to Stockholm aged 16 to study under the court portraitist Georg Engelhard Schröder, before being appointed Court painter to Frederick, Margrave of Brandenburg-Kulmbach in Bayreuth in 1745. In 1747, Roslin received permission to travel to Italy, where he remained for four-and-a- half years, and was introduced to the large and progressive international art community that convened in Rome. In Naples, the artist befriended the French ambassador, who introduced him to the Bourbon court in Parma (where he painted members of the family of Philip, Duke of Parma). He never returned to Bayreuth and would not see his native Sweden again for almost 30 years.

Roslin arrived in Paris in 1752 and quickly ingratiated himself in the French art world, aided by the connections he had made in Italy. Within a year he was agrée at the Académie Royale – despite the obstacles of being foreign and Protestant – and exhibited five portraits at the Salon, including those of François Boucher’s wife and Carle Van Loo’s daughter (both painters had become his close friends). He was elected a full member of the Académie in November 1753 with the submission of portraits of the painters Étienne Jeaurat and Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont (both, Louvre). A favorite of the Paris aristocracy, his success was based on his remarkable technical skills in rendering the appearance and textures of luxurious fabrics and jewels, as well as his gift for rendering a flattering likeness of lively character and personality. Throughout the 1750s and 1760s Roslin gained major clients among the nobility and royal family, receiving portrait commissions from the duc d’Orléans, the Dauphin, two of the daughters of Louis XV, and the Marquis de Marigny, Director of the Bâtiment and brother of the Marquise de Pompadour (see lot 228). He married the gifted pastellist Marie-Suzanne Giroust (1734-1772) in 1759 and was granted accommodations in the Louvre in 1772. Roslin departed Paris during the summer of 1774 – two years after his wife died giving birth to their sixth child – to spend four years travelling Europe. During this journey he made his first return to Sweden – where he had been elected to the Swedish Academy the previous year – before moving on to St. Petersburg (where he painted Empress Catherine the Great), Warsaw and the court of Stanislaus II Augustus, and the Habsburg court in Vienna. He returned to Paris in 1778 and died there five years later, age 75.

The present double portrait is a small-scale version of one of Roslin’s most famous and beloved compositions. Large in size – 163 x 202 cm. – that painting has traditionally been said to depict the French architect Jean-Rodolphe Perronet (1708-1794) and his wife (1759; Göteborgs Konstmuseum). Painted at the height of Roslin’s Paris career – it is signed and dated ‘Alex Roslin le Suédois 1759’ – it is one of the artist’s largest and most ambitious works, as well as among his most affectionate. Perronet is depicted standing in a comfortable, well-appointed salon, smiling toward the viewer. In his outstretched hands he hold the tools of his profession: an architectural model and set of compasses. He wears a dark red frock coat, densely embroidered with gold thread; beneath it he wears a saffron-colored waistcoat embroidered with flowers. His wife sits beside him wearing a fashionable pink gown bordered at the sleeves by layers of lace and a small lace ruff and bow around her neck. (Her costume is markedly similar to that worn by Madame de Pompadour in Boucher’s portrait of the royal mistress in The Wallace Collection, London, also painted in 1759.) Madame Perronet holds a tray of corals and seashells on her lap. A chalk holder, smoker’s kit and faience coffee service sit on the Louis XV-style writing table. The couple smiles warmly and the scene is one of contentment and haute bourgeois domestic comfort.

Jean-Rodolphe Perronet was a French architect and structural engineer from Suresnes, near Paris. His father was a Swiss Guardsman and later a wine merchant. Perronet apprenticed from age 17 in an architectural practice in Paris, where he rose to head a team that designed and constructed the city’s sewers, embankments and banlieue’s roads. In 1747, Perronet was named director of the Bureau des dessinateurs du Roi (Royal Office of Designers), where he trained bridge and road engineers and oversaw their projects. In 1750, he was promoted to inspecteur général of roads and bridges and in 1763 Premier ingénieur du Roi. Between 1750 and his death in 1794, age 85, Perronet was responsible for building 2500 kilometers of roads in and around Paris as well as stone arch bridges in Orléans, Mantes, Neuilly-sur-Seine, and Nemours, among many others. His final accomplishment was his most famous and lasting, the Pont Louis XVI in Paris (today, Pont de la Concorde), completed in 1791.

The Aitken version of the Perronet portrait matches the large version in almost every detail. Because of its small size and looser, brushier handling, it has generally been described as a sketch, or study for the large, more tightly finished canvas, but it is possible that it is, instead, a reduced replica of the finished painting made for an unknown collector, or for retention in the artist’s studio. Regardless, it is both delightfully refined in its details and exceptionally free and painterly in execution, with the bright palette and sparkling effects of light for which Roslin was admired throughout Europe. No doubt this was its principal appeal to the illustrious art collectors who owned it in the 19th and 20th centuries, including Delacroix’s patron, Louis-Auguste, Baron de Schwiter (1805-1889); John Post Heseltine (1843-1929); the banker André Lazard (1869-1931); and Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza (1921-2002).