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AUBRY, Etienne - b. 1745 Versailles, d. 1781 Versailles - WGA

AUBRY, Etienne

(b. 1745 Versailles, d. 1781 Versailles)

French painter. He trained under Jacques-Augustin Silvestre (1719-1809) and Joseph Marie Vien, exhibiting portraits at the Salon from 1771 and becoming a member of the Académie Royale as a portrait painter in 1775. His portraits of such eminent contemporaries as the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (Musée du Louvre, Paris) are characterized by a quiet, understated elegance.

In 1775, ambitious to improve his status as an artist within the hierarchy of genres, he began to exhibit scenes of domestic life. Paternal Love (Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham) is indebted to the paintings of Jean-Baptiste Greuze, but the sentimental subject is depicted with a compositional clarity and restrained naturalism that make Aubry the most original and appealing of Greuze’s imitators. The Nurse’s Farewell (The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown) departs from prototypes by Greuze in its representation of a fashionable urban family in a landscape setting. In the late 1770s Aubry also painted melodramatic scenes, which demonstrate his desire to rival the success of Greuze’s Paternal Curse (Musée du Louvre, Paris).

Aubry’s genre paintings were praised by contemporary critics, including Denis Diderot, and were bought by such notable collectors as the Comte d’Angiviller, Directeur des Bâtiments du Roi. In 1777, under the auspices of d’Angiviller, he went to Rome in order to study to become a history painter, but his progress disappointed the hopes of his patrons. Aubry’s later paintings are untraced.

Farewell to the Wet Nurse
Farewell to the Wet Nurse by

Farewell to the Wet Nurse

An elegantly dressed mother takes her child from the woman on the left, who has nursed him from early infancy. Placing babies in the care of hired wet nurses - preferably young women from rural areas, as the painting’s rustic setting suggests - was a common practice among wealthy French families in the eighteenth century. The child’s gesture and anguished expression reflect the affectionate relationship that could result from this arrangement.

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