‘PEINT PAR DROUAIS LE FILS ET GRAVE PAR BEAUVARLET.’

– Portrait of the Children of the Duke of Bethune.

In stock

Description

Portrait of the Children of the Duke of Bethune.

Made by Jacques-Firmin Beauvarlet after Francois-Hubert Drouais.

Medium: Engraving on hand laid (verge) paper.

Sheet size: 49.2 x 37 cm (19.37 x 14.57 inch). Image size: 47 x 30.6 cm. (18.5 x 12.05 inch).

Condition: good, given age. Several small tears in paper edges backed. General age-related toning and/or occasional minor defects from handling. Please study scan carefully.

PORTRAIT-CHILDREN-DUKE OF BETHUNE-PUG-GUITAR | PORTRAIS – MISC

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Source: unknown, to be determined.

Biography engraver: Jacques Firmin Beauvarlet (1731-1797), a celebrated engraver, was born at Abbeville in 1731. He went to Paris when young, and was instructed in the art by Charles Dupuis and Laurent Cars. His first manner was bold and free, and his plates in that style are preferred by some to the more finished and highly-wrought prints that he afterwards produced, although it must be confessed that the latter are executed with great neatness and delicacy. Beauvarlet married, in 1761, Catherine Jeanne Fran?oise Deschamps, a young lady who possessed some skill in engraving, but who died in 1769 at the age of thirty-one. He married again in 1770, but became for a second time a widower in 1779. Eight years later, in 1787, he married Marie Catherine Riollet, who, like his first wife, was an engraver. She was born in Paris in 1755, and is said to have died in 1788. Beauvarlet himself died in Paris in 1797.

Biography artist: Francois-Hubert Drouais (1727-1775) was a leading French portrait painter during the latter years of Louis XV’s reign. His clientele included the French royal family and nobility, foreign aristocracy, fermiers-generaux (tax farmers), and the wealthier members of Parisian society and their favourites. But it was his increasing popularity at the French court that expanded his clientele and made his portraits a fashionable necessity. Drouais’s work was admired during his lifetime, and his popularity and clientele did not diminish from the occasional adverse judgement published in Salon reviews.