.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The publication of Benôit Audran’s engraving made after Antoine Watteau’s painting Retour de Chasse (fig. 1) was announced in the Mercure de France in December 1727, and the print was included in the Recueil Jullienne (1735), the complete compendium of engravings after Watteau’s paintings published in two volumes by the artist’s friend (and sometimes dealer) Jean de Jullienne. The print denotes the painting as measuring 75,6 x 59,4 cm., more or less the size of the present canvas. The painting itself has been considered lost since it was included in the 1777 inventory of the estate of Marie-Louise Gersaint, eldest daughter of Watteau’s biographer, dealer and patron, Edmé-François Gersaint. Its recent rediscovery is of particular significance since it is an important example of one of the rarest and least-understood facets of Watteau’s work: his endeavors in the genre of portraiture, albeit portraiture of a unique and idiosyncratic sort.
The painting represents an elegant and self-possessed young woman wearing opulent hunting dress, seated beneath a tree in a forest clearing with two hunting dogs at her side, one of whom she affectionately pets on the head. A leather hunting pouch is on the ground beside her and her rifle is propped against the trunk of the tree; the day’s kill, a game bird and a hare, hangs from a branch. The figure of the huntress – whose gaze confidently engages the observer – is of a scale that is large for Watteau and considerably bigger than the tiny figures that populate most of his fêtes galantes. The subject itself is extremely rare, if not unique, in French painting of the first-half of the 18th century: although several of Watteau’s contemporaries painted hunting parties or luncheons in which women are present – one can think of paintings by Largillierre, Nattier, De Troy and Lancret, for example – none depicts a woman with a gun or portrays a woman as having actually participated in the hunt itself. In presenting his subject with a rifle and spoils of the day’s shoot, Watteau created an image that is singular, as Amy Freund recently noted (see A. Freund, 'Men and Hunting Guns in Eighteenth-Century France', in Materializing Gender in Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. J.G. Germann & H.A. Strobel, London, 2016, note 25.)
It was almost certain to have been Jullienne who entitled the painting Retour de Chasse (‘Return from the Hunt’) for the purposes of Audran’s engraving, and it is possible that he sought to enhance the commercial viability of the print by classifying it as a popular genre subject. The Goncourts believed the painting portrayed Jullienne’s niece, Mme. De Vermanton, and an old label on the reverse of the stretcher carries that identification. However, thanks to a handwritten annotation by Mariette ('Notes manuscrites sur les peintres et graveurs', Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; 1740-1770, vol. IX, fol.193 [43]), we know that Watteau’s painting was, in fact, a portrait: 'ce portrait de femme en habit de chasse est celui d’une des filles du Sirois, chez qui Watteau vint demeurer lorsqu’il arriva pour la seconde fois à Paris, après son voyage de Flandres.' The sitter, Marie-Louise Sirois (1696-1725), was the eldest daughter of Pierre Sirois (1665-1726) and his second wife, Marie-Anne Lemoyne, whom he married in 1695. Sirois, a glass merchant and print dealer, became Watteau’s first client when the 25-year-old painter sold him a small picture of a military subject for 60 livres, enabling the artist to finance a return trip to his hometown of Valenciennes in 1709; so pleased was Sirois with his purchase that he immediately pressed Watteau to paint its pendant. (The first painting is lost; the second, The Bivouac, is in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow.) As Mariette’s note alludes, Sirois put Watteau up in his home upon his return to Paris from Valenciennes, around 1710. He would house the artist again, some years later, and sell engravings after Watteau’s paintings in his shop on the Quai Neuf.
Although a number of standard portraits in conventional formats have been attributed to Watteau in the past – the Portrait of Antoine Pater in the Museé des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes, or the so-called Portrait of Sylvia in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, for example – only the Portrait of a Gentleman purchased for the Louvre in 1973 makes a convincing claim to being by the master. The few portraits engraved for the Recueil and therefore attributable to Watteau with absolute certainty are in unconventional formats – Antoine de La Roque (Tokyo Fuji Museum) and the Self Portrait of Watteau with Jean de Jullienne (only recently rediscovered; Private collection) both depict their sitters in small-scale, full-length format in landscape settings, or present their portrait subjects in the guise of genre scenes. Invariably, these ‘disguised’ portraits depict friends of the artist or members of his small circle of dealers, agents and patrons.
It is to this latter category that the present portrait of Marie-Louise Sirois belongs. The daughter of Watteau’s first patron, Marie-Louise could hardly have been more deeply entwined in the artist’s social and professional circles: on 30 January 1718, at the age of 22, she married Watteau’s dealer, Edmé-François Gersaint (for whom he would paint his masterpiece, the celebrated Shopsign, today in Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin); their daughter and only child, Marie-Louise Gersaint (d.1777), would grow up to marry Jean Le Boucq-Santussan, master goldsmith and jeweler, who had himself been depicted as a small child with his parents in Watteau’s painting, The Family (Ortiz Collection, Geneva), itself a group portrait in the guise of a genre scene. Indeed, it is inventories and other documents drawn up after the death of Marie-Louise Gersaint in 1777 that confirm conclusively the identities of the subjects for both The Family and the present painting. In the inventaire après décès of her estate, dated 17 May 1777, a print from her collection is catalogued as 'under glass in a giltwood frame, engraved by Aveline after Watteau, which represents the late Sr. Le Boucq-Santussan and his family' – a print which can only be Pierre Aveline’s engraving after the painting of The Family made for the Recueil Jullienne. In the 'scellés après décès' of the estate, requested by Marie-Louise Gersaint’s daughter, Marie-Françoise Le Boucq-Santussan and dated 3 May 1777, the experts who drew up the document indicate that in a bedroom of the house there was 'a painting on canvas representing a woman wearing hunting costume that said young woman to whom we spoke identified as a portrait of the mother of her mother' (‘un tableau peint sur toile représentant une femme en tenue de chasse que laditte Damoiselle nous a dit être le portrait de la mére de sa mére'), confirming Mariette’s identification from decades earlier of Marie-Louise Sirois – grandmother of Marie-Françoise Le Boucq-Santussan – as Watteau’s model for Retour de Chasse.
Nothing of the little we know of Marie-Louise Sirois’ life indicates any biographical reason for Watteau to portray her as a huntress; in fact, in the inventory of her estate registered on 26 April 1725, following her death at age 29, no hunting clothes, hunting gear or guns were recorded among her possessions. Rather, it seems that it might have been Watteau’s own whimsical choice to portray his patron’s daughter as a huntress. It is the case with most of his ‘disguised’ portraits of friends, that they are portrayed in guises which have no obvious associations to what we know of their everyday lives: 'M. Bougi' – Claude Bougy, a tax collector from Rouen – is portrayed in Le Concert Champêtre (art market) playing a bass viola; the painter Nicolas Vleughels, with whom Watteau shared rooms in 1718-19, appears in the Fêtes Venitiènnes (National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh) as a dancer in ‘oriental’ costume; and Marie-Louise’s own father, Pierre Sirois, is depicted as the guitar-strumming, commedia dell’arte character Mezzetin in Sous un Habit de Mezetin (The Wallace Collection, London; fig. 2). Once again, it is Mariette who provided the key to unlocking the identities in the painting: 'Mr. Sirois, Watteau’s friend, shown among his family as Mezzetin playing the guitar.' While the five figures surrounding Sirois cannot be as firmly identified as he, it is likely that one of the two girls in the painting also represents Marie-Louise if, as Mariette states, Sirois is shown 'among his family'. Donald Posner (1984) was certainly correct when he observed that 'the evidence is strong that virtually all of [Watteau’s] not so very numerous portraits were made for or of friends, people who surely did not dictate the form the paintings took and whose wants did not have to be satisfied in any mercantile sense. Watteau was free to vary and marry portrait and fête galante types as he chose, and his sitters where flattered to see themselves at the center of his elegant, fanciful imagery.'
With only Audran’s print available to them, scholars have tended to associate the Retour de Chasse with Watteau’s earliest contacts with Sirois; Pierre Rosenberg, for example, has dated it to circa 1710. At last able to examine the painting itself, it appears to this author to have been made later in the artist’s career, although situating it precisely is complicated by its somewhat worn surface and old restorations. Certainly, the relatively large scale of the figure and the looser, somewhat summary handling of paint are characteristic of certain of Watteau’s works after 1717. In fact, the gnarled tree, hounds and dead game are remarkably close in conception and handling to those found on the left side of Rendez-vous de Chasse (The Wallace Collection, London), a large hunting painting by Watteau that is generally dated to around 1718-20. One hypothesis might be that Watteau executed the painting in 1718 as a gift to Marie-Louise on the occasion of her marriage to Gersaint; the fact that it remained in the sitter’s family and descended through several generations suggests a strong sentimental attachment to the work.
Watteau made several drawings of women in hunting costume, one of which, in a New York private collection (fig. 3), he likely turned to when composing the present painting, as Parker and Mathey observed. Although there are differences in the turn of the head and position of the sitter’s right arm, the pose of the body and fall of the costume are notably similar; Rosenberg and Prat date the drawing to around 1716.
Perhaps because it remained with Gersaint’s family, Retour de Chasse does not seem to have been often copied. Two old copies are recorded by Vauflart and Dacier: one, measuring 94 x 73 cm., was formerly in the Musée Benôit Depuydt, Bailleul, where it was examined in 1893 by Paul Mantz, who dismissed it as a mediocre copy; it was destroyed in World War I. A second copy, smaller and of better quality, belonged to Albert Cortyl, Mayor of Bailleul, but it, too, perished in the war.
The painting will appear in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Watteau's paintings by Alan Wintermute, currently in preparation.
The painting represents an elegant and self-possessed young woman wearing opulent hunting dress, seated beneath a tree in a forest clearing with two hunting dogs at her side, one of whom she affectionately pets on the head. A leather hunting pouch is on the ground beside her and her rifle is propped against the trunk of the tree; the day’s kill, a game bird and a hare, hangs from a branch. The figure of the huntress – whose gaze confidently engages the observer – is of a scale that is large for Watteau and considerably bigger than the tiny figures that populate most of his fêtes galantes. The subject itself is extremely rare, if not unique, in French painting of the first-half of the 18th century: although several of Watteau’s contemporaries painted hunting parties or luncheons in which women are present – one can think of paintings by Largillierre, Nattier, De Troy and Lancret, for example – none depicts a woman with a gun or portrays a woman as having actually participated in the hunt itself. In presenting his subject with a rifle and spoils of the day’s shoot, Watteau created an image that is singular, as Amy Freund recently noted (see A. Freund, 'Men and Hunting Guns in Eighteenth-Century France', in Materializing Gender in Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. J.G. Germann & H.A. Strobel, London, 2016, note 25.)
It was almost certain to have been Jullienne who entitled the painting Retour de Chasse (‘Return from the Hunt’) for the purposes of Audran’s engraving, and it is possible that he sought to enhance the commercial viability of the print by classifying it as a popular genre subject. The Goncourts believed the painting portrayed Jullienne’s niece, Mme. De Vermanton, and an old label on the reverse of the stretcher carries that identification. However, thanks to a handwritten annotation by Mariette ('Notes manuscrites sur les peintres et graveurs', Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; 1740-1770, vol. IX, fol.193 [43]), we know that Watteau’s painting was, in fact, a portrait: 'ce portrait de femme en habit de chasse est celui d’une des filles du Sirois, chez qui Watteau vint demeurer lorsqu’il arriva pour la seconde fois à Paris, après son voyage de Flandres.' The sitter, Marie-Louise Sirois (1696-1725), was the eldest daughter of Pierre Sirois (1665-1726) and his second wife, Marie-Anne Lemoyne, whom he married in 1695. Sirois, a glass merchant and print dealer, became Watteau’s first client when the 25-year-old painter sold him a small picture of a military subject for 60 livres, enabling the artist to finance a return trip to his hometown of Valenciennes in 1709; so pleased was Sirois with his purchase that he immediately pressed Watteau to paint its pendant. (The first painting is lost; the second, The Bivouac, is in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow.) As Mariette’s note alludes, Sirois put Watteau up in his home upon his return to Paris from Valenciennes, around 1710. He would house the artist again, some years later, and sell engravings after Watteau’s paintings in his shop on the Quai Neuf.
Although a number of standard portraits in conventional formats have been attributed to Watteau in the past – the Portrait of Antoine Pater in the Museé des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes, or the so-called Portrait of Sylvia in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, for example – only the Portrait of a Gentleman purchased for the Louvre in 1973 makes a convincing claim to being by the master. The few portraits engraved for the Recueil and therefore attributable to Watteau with absolute certainty are in unconventional formats – Antoine de La Roque (Tokyo Fuji Museum) and the Self Portrait of Watteau with Jean de Jullienne (only recently rediscovered; Private collection) both depict their sitters in small-scale, full-length format in landscape settings, or present their portrait subjects in the guise of genre scenes. Invariably, these ‘disguised’ portraits depict friends of the artist or members of his small circle of dealers, agents and patrons.
It is to this latter category that the present portrait of Marie-Louise Sirois belongs. The daughter of Watteau’s first patron, Marie-Louise could hardly have been more deeply entwined in the artist’s social and professional circles: on 30 January 1718, at the age of 22, she married Watteau’s dealer, Edmé-François Gersaint (for whom he would paint his masterpiece, the celebrated Shopsign, today in Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin); their daughter and only child, Marie-Louise Gersaint (d.1777), would grow up to marry Jean Le Boucq-Santussan, master goldsmith and jeweler, who had himself been depicted as a small child with his parents in Watteau’s painting, The Family (Ortiz Collection, Geneva), itself a group portrait in the guise of a genre scene. Indeed, it is inventories and other documents drawn up after the death of Marie-Louise Gersaint in 1777 that confirm conclusively the identities of the subjects for both The Family and the present painting. In the inventaire après décès of her estate, dated 17 May 1777, a print from her collection is catalogued as 'under glass in a giltwood frame, engraved by Aveline after Watteau, which represents the late Sr. Le Boucq-Santussan and his family' – a print which can only be Pierre Aveline’s engraving after the painting of The Family made for the Recueil Jullienne. In the 'scellés après décès' of the estate, requested by Marie-Louise Gersaint’s daughter, Marie-Françoise Le Boucq-Santussan and dated 3 May 1777, the experts who drew up the document indicate that in a bedroom of the house there was 'a painting on canvas representing a woman wearing hunting costume that said young woman to whom we spoke identified as a portrait of the mother of her mother' (‘un tableau peint sur toile représentant une femme en tenue de chasse que laditte Damoiselle nous a dit être le portrait de la mére de sa mére'), confirming Mariette’s identification from decades earlier of Marie-Louise Sirois – grandmother of Marie-Françoise Le Boucq-Santussan – as Watteau’s model for Retour de Chasse.
Nothing of the little we know of Marie-Louise Sirois’ life indicates any biographical reason for Watteau to portray her as a huntress; in fact, in the inventory of her estate registered on 26 April 1725, following her death at age 29, no hunting clothes, hunting gear or guns were recorded among her possessions. Rather, it seems that it might have been Watteau’s own whimsical choice to portray his patron’s daughter as a huntress. It is the case with most of his ‘disguised’ portraits of friends, that they are portrayed in guises which have no obvious associations to what we know of their everyday lives: 'M. Bougi' – Claude Bougy, a tax collector from Rouen – is portrayed in Le Concert Champêtre (art market) playing a bass viola; the painter Nicolas Vleughels, with whom Watteau shared rooms in 1718-19, appears in the Fêtes Venitiènnes (National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh) as a dancer in ‘oriental’ costume; and Marie-Louise’s own father, Pierre Sirois, is depicted as the guitar-strumming, commedia dell’arte character Mezzetin in Sous un Habit de Mezetin (The Wallace Collection, London; fig. 2). Once again, it is Mariette who provided the key to unlocking the identities in the painting: 'Mr. Sirois, Watteau’s friend, shown among his family as Mezzetin playing the guitar.' While the five figures surrounding Sirois cannot be as firmly identified as he, it is likely that one of the two girls in the painting also represents Marie-Louise if, as Mariette states, Sirois is shown 'among his family'. Donald Posner (1984) was certainly correct when he observed that 'the evidence is strong that virtually all of [Watteau’s] not so very numerous portraits were made for or of friends, people who surely did not dictate the form the paintings took and whose wants did not have to be satisfied in any mercantile sense. Watteau was free to vary and marry portrait and fête galante types as he chose, and his sitters where flattered to see themselves at the center of his elegant, fanciful imagery.'
With only Audran’s print available to them, scholars have tended to associate the Retour de Chasse with Watteau’s earliest contacts with Sirois; Pierre Rosenberg, for example, has dated it to circa 1710. At last able to examine the painting itself, it appears to this author to have been made later in the artist’s career, although situating it precisely is complicated by its somewhat worn surface and old restorations. Certainly, the relatively large scale of the figure and the looser, somewhat summary handling of paint are characteristic of certain of Watteau’s works after 1717. In fact, the gnarled tree, hounds and dead game are remarkably close in conception and handling to those found on the left side of Rendez-vous de Chasse (The Wallace Collection, London), a large hunting painting by Watteau that is generally dated to around 1718-20. One hypothesis might be that Watteau executed the painting in 1718 as a gift to Marie-Louise on the occasion of her marriage to Gersaint; the fact that it remained in the sitter’s family and descended through several generations suggests a strong sentimental attachment to the work.
Watteau made several drawings of women in hunting costume, one of which, in a New York private collection (fig. 3), he likely turned to when composing the present painting, as Parker and Mathey observed. Although there are differences in the turn of the head and position of the sitter’s right arm, the pose of the body and fall of the costume are notably similar; Rosenberg and Prat date the drawing to around 1716.
Perhaps because it remained with Gersaint’s family, Retour de Chasse does not seem to have been often copied. Two old copies are recorded by Vauflart and Dacier: one, measuring 94 x 73 cm., was formerly in the Musée Benôit Depuydt, Bailleul, where it was examined in 1893 by Paul Mantz, who dismissed it as a mediocre copy; it was destroyed in World War I. A second copy, smaller and of better quality, belonged to Albert Cortyl, Mayor of Bailleul, but it, too, perished in the war.
The painting will appear in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Watteau's paintings by Alan Wintermute, currently in preparation.