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| Jean-Baptiste Huet (Paris 1745 - Paris 1811)
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| Landscape with a young boy and a shepherdess with cows and sheep
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Signed and dated on the bridge, lower left: J.B. Hüet 1786
Oil on canvas, oval
23½ x 19¼ in. (59.7 x 48.9 cm.)
Provenance: Palais Galliera, Paris, 11 December 1961, lot 47; Richard Green, London where bought by the previous owner.
Exhibited: Wildenstein & Co., A Collection of European Paintings from the Early Renaissance to the Modernists, New York and Paris, 25 November - 31 December 1933, no. 43; London, Richard Green, Old Master Paintings, 16 November – 24 December 1988, no. 28
The Colnaghi-Bernheimer painting is a charming example of one of Huet’s pastoral landscapes. Executed in 1786, it is the earlier version of a similar landscape of 1789 which was sold at Hôtel Drouet, Paris, in 1911. This landscape was so popular that a patron commissioned a second version three years later, presumably after having seen the original. The figures are arranged with verve and imagination and the foliage and trees are painted with typical virtuosity. The rustically dressed peasant girl, who is pushing her small herd of cattle and sheep through the water, and the young boy on the bridge adorn the lower part of the canvas. This work is reminiscent of similar scenes by Huet’s master, Francois Boucher, for example, a Landscape with a rustic bridge, which is currently with Colnaghi.
Jean-Baptiste Marie Huet I (1745-1811) was born in 1745 in the Louvre, the son of Nicolas Huet, an animal and armorial painter in the Garde Meuble du Roi. He was the nephew of the decorative painter, Christophe Huet II (1700-1759), who collaborated with Claude Audran III on the decoration of the Château d’Anet, and painted some famous singerie and arabesque decorations at the Château de Chantilly and in the Hotel Rohan, Paris. Jean-Bapiste Huet was apprenticed first to the successful animal painter, Dagommer, before entering in 1766 the studio of Boucher’s pupil, Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, for whom he worked during the later 1760s and with whom he seems to have enjoyed a very close relationship. He quickly assimilated Boucher’s style and may even have been instructed by the master himself, becoming one of the most skillful of Boucher’s imitators. In 1769 he married Marie-Généviève, daughter of the painter Jean-François Chevalier, by whom he had three sons, all of them artists. In 1767 Huet began to exhibit at the Salon and in 1769 was made a member of the Académie Royale, having submitted as his reception piece Dog attacking geese (Musée du Louvre, Paris), and was admitted to the Académie as an animal painter. He continued to exhibit at the Salon until 1802. His animal paintings were praised by Diderot who compared them favourably to works by Oudry. Despite the air of fantasy in his paintings, which was derived from his master Le Prince, Huet, like his English counterpart Stubbs, had a very firm grasp of the anatomy of animals and published several studies of animal skeletons. In 1770, at the suggestion of Jean-Baptiste Pierre, the young Huet was commissioned to paint with Fragonard a series of four canvases for the King’s Dining-Room at Versailles. These were apparently never executed, but between 1765 and 1770 he collaborated with Boucher and Fragonard on a decorative scheme for the engraver Gilles Demarteau’s house in Paris, consisting of large paintings representing landscapes and animals, against a trellis-like backdrop. At that time Huet was principally known as an animal painter, but in 1779 he made his début as a history painter at the Salon with a huge painting of Hercule and Omphale, which received rather mixed reviews. More successful were the numerous drawings that he made of sporting, gallant and pastoral subjects in the 1770s, which were popularized through the engravings of Demarteau, who had been Boucher’s principal engraver. In the 1770s and 1780s he also painted a number of landscapes and pictures of the seasons and times of day in the manner of Boucher. He was also a prolific print-maker, engraving plates for the Duc de Choiseul’s Voyage pittoresque en Grèce. In 1790 Huet became attached to the textile manufactory of Jouy, as well as the famous tapestry factories of Gobelins and Beauvais, for whom he provided numerous designs in the manner of Boucher and Oudry. Although Huet’s later work showed the influence of neo-classicism, he remained largely untouched by the more austere spirit of the French Revolution and continued to paint subjects in the Rococo manner until the end of the eighteenth century.
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P. and D. Colnaghi and Co., Ltd - 15 Old Bond Street London W1S 4AX, United Kingdom Tel: +44-20-7491 7408 Fax: +44-20-7491 8851 contact@colnaghi.co.uk
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