XV - Works On Paper - Marty de Cambiaire (English)

Pierre-Paul Sevin
Tournon 1650 – 1710
11
Design for the Funerary momument of Gaston de Foix-Nemours
Pen and brown ink, gouache and gold paint on vellum laid on panel
Signed and dated p. Sevin invenit 1670 at lower left
Long inscription in Latin at lower centre on the pall decorated with fleur de lys by A.N. Amelot.Gall.Leg./
ad Ven.secret
420 x 280 mm (16 ½ x 11 in.)
PROVENANCE
Defer-Dumesnil collection (L.739); its sale, Paris,
Hôtel Drouot, 10-11-12 May 1900, no. 210.
LITERATURE
Catalogue descriptif des dessins de décoration et
d’ornement de maîtres anciens exposés au Musée
des arts décoratifs en 1880, Paris, Imprimerie de
publications périodiques, 1880, p. 99 ; Louis-Antoine
Prat, Le Dessin français au XVII e siècle, Louvre éditions
et Somogy, Paris, 2013, p. 223-225.
EXHIBITED
Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 1880, no. 368
Born in Tournon, Pierre-Paul Sevin was trained by
his father, François Sevin, to be a painter-decorator.
Between 1666 and 1672, he visited Milan, Venice
and Rome, where he stayed for a while and worked on
many drawings of firework displays and celebrations
for Clement IX and Christina of Sweden. Upon his
return to Paris in 1673, he opened a workshop and
worked alongside the Jesuits, particularly with the
Lyonese Père Ménestrier, painter of decorations,
allegories, devices and emblems.
In 1677, Sevin joined the Academy of Saint-Luke.
He was never admitted to the Royal Academy of
Painting and Sculpture but that did not prevent
him from receiving abundant commissions: for
miniatures, such as those ordered by Louis XIV for
Madame de Montespan; frontispieces, almanacs and
ornate madrigals; decorations, such as the dome in
the church of St. Catherine for the Sisters of Mercy in
rue Saint-Denis and the panelling in the parliament
of Dombes; ephemeral decorations for funerary
ceremonies and solemn entrances; and machines
for fireworks. In 1679, he was appointed official
painter to the cardinal de Bouillon, as recorded by
Ménestrier 1 . Based on fifty-four preparatory drawings
in the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts
as well as on an unsigned biographyr 2 , Damien
Chantrenne, in an article written in 2009, reattributed
to Sevin the decoration of the courtyard of the Jesuit
college in Lyon, now destroyed yet known from
Father Ménestrier’s description.
A good number of drawings by this prolific artist
survive, of which less than fifteen gouaches.
Whether solemn or festive, they commemorate
the important occasions of Louis XIV’s reign with
rare refinement. The present sheet shows a funerary
monument in honour of Gaston de Foix. After his
victory in the battle of Ravenna in 1512, de Foix,
nicknamed “The Thunderbolt of Italy”, was buried
in the Milan cathedral and moved to the church of
St. Martha after the French left. In 1515, François I
commissioned the sculptors Polidoro and Agostino
Busti to create a mausoleum in his honour, but they
never brought the project to a conclusion as the
French definitively lost the duchy of Milan in 1522.
The mausoleum in the present gouache is thus an
imaginary monument, conceived in collaboration
with the memoirist and historian Abraham-Nicolas
Amelot de La Houssaye (1634-1706) as indicated
by the signature below the Latin text. The date 1670
on the gouache corresponds to the period of Sevin’s
Italian journey, during which he met Amelot de
La Houssaye. This cultivated and capricious man,
appointed French ambassador at Venice from 1669
to 1671, was in fact stripped of his office for a theft
of documents. In his Tacite avec des notes politiques
et historiques published a good number of times,
the historian evokes Gaston de Foix’s death because
of his too arduous pursuit of an already beaten
enemy 3 . During the 1880 exhibition in the Musée
des arts décoratifs, the present work was displayed
in the vicinity of one of Agostino Busti’s drawings
made in preparation for funerary monument of
Gaston de Foix as it was actually commissioned 4 .
Busti’s drawing was formerly in the collection of the
duke d’Aumale and is now in the Musée Condé in
Chantilly (Inv. DE 115).
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