Jacques-Antoine-Marie Lemoine

Jacques-Antoine-Marie Lemoine was a painter, draughtsman and miniaturist. Having begun his studies under Jean-Baptiste Descamps in his native Rouen in 1770, he was subsequently taught by Jean Jacques Lagrenée at the École des Beaux-arts in Paris and from about 1777 possibly by Maurice Quentin de Latour. At this time he also collaborated with the printmaker, Jean-François Janinet. In 1784 Lemoine married the miniaturist, Agathe-Françoise Bonvallet, after whose death in 1795 he returned to Rouen, where he was appointed professor of drawing at the École de Marine in 1799.

A superb draughtsman, Lemoine made numerous portraits in pastel, gouache, watercolour and black chalk of female actors and singers, artists, monarchs and politicians. From 1784 he also painted miniatures on ivory. According to the inscription, he executed this technically brilliant work in 1783 when he was still in Paris. It is related to a group of drawings he produced between 1783 and 1788 showing elegantly dressed ladies in a landscape setting styled on an English country garden. Comparable examples are to be found in the Horvitz Collection (see Alvin L. Clarke [ed.], Tradition and Transitions. Eighteenth Century French Art from the Horvitz Collection, 2017, no. 130, p. 327 f.) and in Harvard (Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum inv. 1978.50 and 1978.48).

The three ladies in a Rococo garden – probably Zofia Potocka and her daughters – are shown attempting to entice a bird with grapes, a metaphor for their female charms. Potocka, a former courtesan favoured by European diplomats in Constantinople and described by contemporaries as “the most beautiful woman in Europe”, rose to the status of a Polish imperial countess by dint of her marriage. Lemoine’s characteristic use of black, smudged and overdrawn chalk lines together with his highly accurate yet free flowing linework evokes an impression of atmospheric freshness and momentariness and makes this technically accomplished sheet a very fine example of draughtsmanship from the Rococo period. 

14.000 €