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| LOUIS-MICHEL VAN LOO (Toulon 1707 - Paris 1771)
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| A Spanish woman playing the guitar
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Signed and dated lower right L.M. Van Loo 1769
Oil on canvas
44 ⅞ x 33 ⅞ in. (114 x 86 cm.)
Provenance: Paris, Salon of 1769, N°4; Former collection of S.A.S. Monseigneur Le Prince de Conti; Anon. Sale, Paris, 1777, N°718 (with its pendant A German woman playing the harp, for 300 francs)
Literature: D. Diderot, Salon IV. Héros et martyrs, Salons de 1769, 1771, 1775, 1781, Paris, Ed. 1995, p. 23
Louis-Michel Van Loo received his early training, alongside his only slightly older uncle Carle van Loo (1705-1765), from his father, the artist Jean-Baptiste Van Loo (1684-1745) in Turin, Rome, and Paris. In 1725, one year after his uncle, he won First Prize at the Académie Royale with a now lost painting: Moses with Pharaoh’s crown. In 1727 he moved to Rome with his uncle, brother, and François Boucher to study as a pensionnaire at the French Academy and he remained there until 1732. The following year, having returned to Paris, he was received into the Académie Royale as a history painter, his morceau de reception being Apollo and Daphne (École des Beaux-Arts, Paris). In 1737, Van Loo moved to Madrid, where he enjoyed great success for fifteen years and became the official court painter to Philip V and Ferdinand VI. He participated in the founding of the Madrid Academy in 1752. He returned to Paris and exhibited at the Salon from 1753 to 1769. An extremely skilful portrait painter, Van Loo recorded the likenesses of Louis XV, members of the royal family and court, and a number of contemporary artists and intellectuals. Among the most admired were the group portrait, Carle Van Loo and his Family (1757; Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris) and his famous Portrait of Diderot, exhibited in 1767 (Musée du Louvre, Paris). Louis-Michel Van Loo was greatly admired for his unrivalled ability to seize a likeness and to capture on his canvasses, not only the features of his sitters, but their characters and spirit as well. On the death of his uncle in 1765, Louis-Michel was appointed Director of the École Royale des Élèves Protégés. Though his overwhelming success was in portraits, he was no less skilled in genre scenes, where his powerful grasp of physiognomy, was combined with a skilful attention to detail and a more intimate sense of atmosphere.
Our unpublished Spanish woman playing guitar is one of Louis-Michel Van Loo’s most charming productions, painted at a time when the artist was enjoying considerable public acclaim. The work was displayed at the Salon of 1769 with its present title. It can be considered as the pendant to a composition of the same format, A German woman playing the harp (Private Collection), which the artist exhibited at the Salon under a different number that same year. The three men who listen closely to the young harpist are almost identical to the men who are listening to the guitarist in the Colnaghi-Bernheimer painting. The two works were once part of Prince de Conti’s collection (Louis-François de Bourbon, Prince de Conti (1717-1776)) and were sold together, as a single lot, in 1777. The Colnaghi-Bernheimer picture is notable for opulence and sumptuousness, the wealth and status of the characters conveyed by the shimmering garments. Van Loo has presented them in an idealized scene of domestic bliss. The artist has clearly taken delight in rendering the contrasting colours and textures of the fabrics, and the wood of the guitar, particularly notable in the figure of the Spanish woman herself, dazzlingly resplendent in her silk dress and lace shawl.
The composition of the Colnaghi work displays a deep understanding of the mise- en- scène. The attitudes and varied facial expressions of the exclusively male audience set the tone and pay the young lady respect and attention she deserves. Van Loo’s talent reveals itself in the execution of the clothing, the heavy drapery revealing the full extent of the richness of the white satin dress of the musician and the red velvet coat of the seated man. The colours of the clothes worn by the men are carefully orchestrated in an arrangement of primary colours – blue, yellow, red – set off against the white coat worn by one of the figures and beautiful silver reflections.
The inspiration behind the Colnaghi-Bernheimer painting probably came from the work of Louis Michel’s uncle Carle Van Loo, who had developed the same concert theme in a painting entitled the Spanish conversation (Hermitage Collection, St Petersburg) dated 1754 which was exhibited at the 1755 Salon. Spurred by his uncle’s success, Louis-Michel in fact painted several paintings of the same theme such as A Spanish Concert with fifteen characters, commissioned by prince Gallitzin for Catherine II (dated 1768, Hermitage, St Petersburg), A German woman playing the harp and our Spanish woman playing guitar, both displayed at the 1769 Salon.
The great critic Diderot was among those to be seduced by the charms of the Spanish woman playing guitar: “A fine work well worth praising: the perspective is well understood, a calm if hearty balance pervades; and of course, we find the finest of draperies” (Diderot, Salon IV. Héros et martyrs, Salons de 1769, 1771, 1775, 1781, Paris, Ed. 1995, p.23).
By the late 1760s, the boundaries between genre and portraiture were fluid and the Colnaghi-Bernheimer A Spanish woman playing guitar reflects the artist’s painterly skill in representing a lady of the society of his time with all the attributes of courtly leisure combined with a charming element of exoticism.
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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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