REVOLUTION

34
JEAN BAPTISTE REGNAULT
(PARIS 1754-1829)
Dana‘
oil on canvas
19√ x 24¿ in. (50.5 x 61.3 cm.)
$30,000-50,000 £22,000-35,000
€28,000-46,000
PROVENANCE:
Jean de Sabran-Pontevès (according to a label on the reverse).
Mr Alvarez de Toledo, Paris and Buenos Aires (according to a label on the reverse).
Winner of the Rome Prize in 1776, Jean-Baptiste Regnault established himself in
the 1780s as one of David’s principal rivals. While he displayed enormous gifts in
all registers of history painting, his reputation hinged mainly on his virtuosity in
graceful subjects and the female nude. In opposition to David’s radical modernity,
Regnault embodied the continuation of a mythological tradition going back to
Correggio and the seventeenth-century Bolognese masters. In parallel with his
large works he produced numerous cabinet paintings whose success he ensured
by having engravings made. The diferent versions of his compositions that have
come down to us testify to the considerable demand triggered by this strategy.
Thus his career was studded with variations on the theme of Danaë, whose frst
recorded appearance in his oeuvre dates from the Auguste-Gabriel Godefroy
sale of 2 April 1794: “A half-length Danaë, oval-shaped widthwise”. The picture
was withdrawn from the sale, perhaps for reasons that turned up twenty years
later, at the time of the collector’s posthumous sale on 14 December 1813, when
it was described as a “vividly colored, meticulously painted piece after Monsieur
Regnault. 23 x 19 p [approx. 62 x 51 cm].” The presence of this supposed copy
in Godefroy’s collection is surprising, given that he was also the owner of two
of Reganult’s most famous pictures, both now in the Louvre: The Deluge and
Socrates Tearing Alcibiades from the Embrace of Sensual Pleasure. A licked fnish
copy sold in 2008 and titled La Petite mort (‘Climax’) fts closely with the idea of
the “meticulously painted” Godefroy picture.
At the Salon in 1795 Regnault presented another oval work, a Head of Danaë,
together with a more narrative but smaller version of the subject: the heroine on
a bed, receiving Jupiter transformed into golden rain. The latter was engraved
by Chaponnier in 1804, together with its pendant, Io and Jupiter. In the catalogue
of the artist’s posthumous sale of 1 March 1830, late replicas of these two erotic
subjects are followed by two busts of Danaë: no. 18 is described as “Danaë
receiving the golden rain. Head and bust only; oval shape”, and no. 74, as “A young
female nude, sleeping in the pose of a Danaë”. One of them had mostly likely
served as the model for the engraving published by Loquemin and Gigoux in 1829.
While all these factors do not make identifcation of our picture easy, its quality
unarguably points to the hand of Regnault. The transparency of the shadows, the
delicate details of the lips and hands, and above all the suppleness of modelling
whose small brushstrokes give the fesh its vibrancy, correspond closely to his late
manner, and demonstrate that he was capable until the end of virtuoso portrayal of
the voluptuous female nude.
Our thanks to Mehdi Korchane, for confrming the attribution of the present lot to
Regnault on the basis of a photograph, and for his assistance on the preparation
of the entry.