MASP

By Luciano Migliaccio
The painting Duc the Barry and Counte as Provenance as Children commissioned by Louis XV’s son, who died before raising to the throne of France, features his two sons, the Duc de Barry, future king Louis XVI (beheaded in 1793), and Comte de Provence, the future Louis XVIII. In the painting, the two princes are wearing the Order of the Holy Spirit. The younger, aged two, is playing with his puppy dog while the other, one year older, holds a basket he is filling with apples, peaches, and grapes, as if he were harvesting, though his clothes in no way resemble peasant clothes. The painter’s biographers view the portrait Duc de Barry and Counte as Provence as Children as one of the most important milestones in Drouais’ career. The commission of this portrait to an artist who was only thirty years old and had not yet been accepted as a member of the Académie (his official appointment occurred in 1758) was a mark of recognition and his name became well known in Paris. It is known that the monarch ordered three copies of this portrait (Engerand 1900, pp. 166-167), in which the artist set his subjects in an Arcadian landscape taken from literature, thereupon creating a true genre within the portraiture of that time. His characters are shepherds or peasants, but inspired by conventional folklore with the the elegant attire in silk and velvet, ribbons and wigs typical of the French nobility. Drouais was particularly successful with children, in whose portraits he could omit the signs of social class and juxtapose the candidness of childhood to that of the people. Consequently, Comte de Condé’s children were depicted as gardeners and the young prince of Bouillon, as a local mountaineer who performed a groundhog dance in exchange for a few sous. The artist also painted portraits set in mythological environments. In the portrait in the Masp Collection, the stiff carriage of figures in contrast with the minute description of their rich clothing led Camesasca (1988) to identify an intentional, ironical candidness that, in his opinion, mocks the pomp of the Baroque past. According to Aguilar (1989), Drouais lent to the two children a luminosity that suggests the glitter of crystal glasses in Willem Kalff ’s still life paintings. Drouais’ psychological characterization of children may lead us to consider his work as an important move in the modern interest in portraiture of children.

— Luciano Migliaccio, 1998

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