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Lot Essay
Of all the French painters of the 17th century, Sèbastien Bourdon was the most various, turning his hand with equal success to bambochades, portraits, religious paintings and landscapes. Born in Montpellier and raised a Protestant, Bourdon received his earliest training in Paris, but had left for Italy by the time he was 18 years old. While in Rome, he made a living painting copies for the tourist trade, and it was there that he first encountered the animal scenes of Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione and the low-life genre scenes of the Dutch Italianate painters, including Pieter van Laer.
Fear of the Inquisition forced Bourdon to flee Rome and return to Paris in 1637. In France, he continued to paint naturalistic genre scenes in the style of van Laer, but also succeeded with large baroque altarpieces, such as The Martyrdom of St. Peter, commissioned in 1643 for Nôtre-Dame. Bourdon does not seem to have encountered Poussin’s art in Rome, and he remained largely insensible to its influence until the 1640s; but Poussin’s brief visit to Paris between 1640-42, had a profound impact on the younger artist, who upon seeing the master’s works, turned increasingly to landscapes and monumental religious compositions with rigorously defined planes, Poussinesque figural types and fresh coloring. In 1648, Bourdon became one the twelve founding members of the Académie royale; in 1652, he travelled to Sweden at the behest of Queen Christina, where he executed elegant and melancholic portraits that represent a French response to the court portraiture of van Dyck. Upon his return to Paris in 1654, Bourdon was appointed one of the four rectors of the Académie, where he taught and delivered an important series of papers in 1663 in which he codified his theory of classicism, with Poussin as its cornerstone. Bourdon’s mature works, which include his masterpiece, The Finding of Moses in the National Gallery of Art, Washington from the mid-1650s, are elegantly balanced chromatic compositions which build upon the principles of classical form and space as set forth by Poussin, but synthesized in a manner – cool, decorative and sophisticated in palette – that is distinctly his own, displaying, as Pierre Rosenberg has written, 'a natural elegance…that heralds an entirely new dimension in French painting, one that would come to fruition in the 18th century'.
The La Salle Flight into Egypt is one of the finest and most important pictures of Bourdon’s mature years, datable on stylistic grounds to his final period, probably after 1665 according to Jacques Thuillier. In a composition of the utmost harmony and decorative refinement, it effortlessly integrates all the major sources of Bourdon’s career: here are to be found the superbly sensitive rendering of animals and people on the move that Bourdon admired in the paintings of Castiglione and the Bassano family; the sympathetic portrayal of peasants that he had perfected during his first years in Rome looking at the works of van Laer; and the grand and complex, yet formally balanced, compositional design that he learned from his mature study of the works of Poussin. Indeed, Thuillier suggests a direct correspondence between this painting and works by Poussin, whose own Flight into Egypt of 1658 in a New York private collection – with its comparable format, mise en page and attentive flying angel – would have been easily accessible to Bourdon in the collection of its owner, Poussin’s friend, Jacques Serisier.
Bourdon addressed the subject of the Flight into Egypt in numerous etchings and several drawings (see Thuillier, op. cit., nos. 88, 178, 341, 117, 265), and, as Rosenberg notes (loc. cit., 1984), the artist must have painted it on a number of occasions, if one is to judge by the frequent references to the subject that appear in 18th- and 19th-century sales catalogues; however, apart from the present painting and a beautiful little oil on panel from the Kaufmann and Schlageter bequest to the Louvre (fig. 1), no other painted versions of the subject are known to survive. The earliest history of the La Salle Flight into Egypt is undocumented; however, its 18th-century history is illustrious: it was in the distinguished collection of the writer Louis-Jean-François Collet, and soon reappeared in the collection of Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, powerful Minister of Finance for Louis XVI and an active collector and patron of Mme. Vigée-Le Brun. In Calonne’s 1788 sale, the La Salle Flight into Egypt is described as 'of fine coloring, great quality of drawing, to be regarded as one of the most important works of this skillful Master.'
Fear of the Inquisition forced Bourdon to flee Rome and return to Paris in 1637. In France, he continued to paint naturalistic genre scenes in the style of van Laer, but also succeeded with large baroque altarpieces, such as The Martyrdom of St. Peter, commissioned in 1643 for Nôtre-Dame. Bourdon does not seem to have encountered Poussin’s art in Rome, and he remained largely insensible to its influence until the 1640s; but Poussin’s brief visit to Paris between 1640-42, had a profound impact on the younger artist, who upon seeing the master’s works, turned increasingly to landscapes and monumental religious compositions with rigorously defined planes, Poussinesque figural types and fresh coloring. In 1648, Bourdon became one the twelve founding members of the Académie royale; in 1652, he travelled to Sweden at the behest of Queen Christina, where he executed elegant and melancholic portraits that represent a French response to the court portraiture of van Dyck. Upon his return to Paris in 1654, Bourdon was appointed one of the four rectors of the Académie, where he taught and delivered an important series of papers in 1663 in which he codified his theory of classicism, with Poussin as its cornerstone. Bourdon’s mature works, which include his masterpiece, The Finding of Moses in the National Gallery of Art, Washington from the mid-1650s, are elegantly balanced chromatic compositions which build upon the principles of classical form and space as set forth by Poussin, but synthesized in a manner – cool, decorative and sophisticated in palette – that is distinctly his own, displaying, as Pierre Rosenberg has written, 'a natural elegance…that heralds an entirely new dimension in French painting, one that would come to fruition in the 18th century'.
The La Salle Flight into Egypt is one of the finest and most important pictures of Bourdon’s mature years, datable on stylistic grounds to his final period, probably after 1665 according to Jacques Thuillier. In a composition of the utmost harmony and decorative refinement, it effortlessly integrates all the major sources of Bourdon’s career: here are to be found the superbly sensitive rendering of animals and people on the move that Bourdon admired in the paintings of Castiglione and the Bassano family; the sympathetic portrayal of peasants that he had perfected during his first years in Rome looking at the works of van Laer; and the grand and complex, yet formally balanced, compositional design that he learned from his mature study of the works of Poussin. Indeed, Thuillier suggests a direct correspondence between this painting and works by Poussin, whose own Flight into Egypt of 1658 in a New York private collection – with its comparable format, mise en page and attentive flying angel – would have been easily accessible to Bourdon in the collection of its owner, Poussin’s friend, Jacques Serisier.
Bourdon addressed the subject of the Flight into Egypt in numerous etchings and several drawings (see Thuillier, op. cit., nos. 88, 178, 341, 117, 265), and, as Rosenberg notes (loc. cit., 1984), the artist must have painted it on a number of occasions, if one is to judge by the frequent references to the subject that appear in 18th- and 19th-century sales catalogues; however, apart from the present painting and a beautiful little oil on panel from the Kaufmann and Schlageter bequest to the Louvre (fig. 1), no other painted versions of the subject are known to survive. The earliest history of the La Salle Flight into Egypt is undocumented; however, its 18th-century history is illustrious: it was in the distinguished collection of the writer Louis-Jean-François Collet, and soon reappeared in the collection of Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, powerful Minister of Finance for Louis XVI and an active collector and patron of Mme. Vigée-Le Brun. In Calonne’s 1788 sale, the La Salle Flight into Egypt is described as 'of fine coloring, great quality of drawing, to be regarded as one of the most important works of this skillful Master.'