A young woman at the harpsichord

This charming drawing of a woman playing the harpsichord is characteristic of Louis-Roland Trinquesse’s graphic manner. As a student, the artist had won two medals for his work, but he was never accepted formally into the Academy and so never exhibited at the Salon.Trinquesse specialized in creating portraits and scènes galantes drawn in red chalk. Edmond and Jules Goncourt, who collected several of his works, referred to him as a ‘crayonneur à la sanguine’.

While this composition is a finished drawing in its own right, the figure is a study for the young woman playing the harpsichord in Trinquesse’s painting, The music party in Munich (fig. 1; inv. HUW 37, Alte Pinakothek; see C. Bailey, P. Conisbee, and T. Gaehtgens, The Age of Watteau Chardin and Fragonard. Masterpieces of French Genre Painting, exhib. cat., Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, Washington, National Gallery of Art, Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, 2003-2004, no. 100, ill.). For this important commission the artist had created an extensive group of red-chalk and charcoal drawings. A similar composition with a harpsichord player, dated 1763, is now in the Louvre (inv. no. 40667; see Acquisitions 1984-1989, exhib. cat., Paris, Louvre, 1990, no. 163).

Fig. 1. Louis-Rolland Trinquesse, The music party. Munich, Alte Pinakothek.