DUPLESSIS, Joseph-Siffred

Duplessis was a French painter who studied with Subleyras in Rome 1745-49. Returning to France he pursued a career as portraitist in Paris, while retaining close links to his home town of Carpentras. After 1774 Duplessis won favour at the court of the new king, Louis XVI, and painted portraits of the entire royal family, as well as of Gluck (1775, Vienna) and Benjamin Franklin (1779). While in Paris, he dispatched altar paintings to the cathedral of Carpentras, as well as decorative landscape paintings to the local hospital. He retired to Carpentras from 1792 to 1796.

During the reign of Louis XVI Duplessis was a portraitist in Paris. The most popular of his numerous portraits is that representing the great composer Gluck. It was painted during the Gluck’s stay in Paris on the occasion of the first performances of his operas Iphigeneia in Aulis and Armida.

Listen to the Gavotte from Gluck’s Iphigeneia in Aulis

Duplessis, while pursuing a career as a portraitist in Paris, dispatched altar paintings to the cathedral of his home town of Carpentras, as well as decorative landscape paintings to the local hospital. He retired to Carpentras from 1972 to 1786.

The picture shows a landscape painted on cupboard doors in the pharmacy of the hospital.

This painting is one of the numerous existing versions of Duplessis’s Franklin portraits. Most of these portraits fall into two categories: the ‘fur coat’ type as seen in the original version in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, new York, and the latter ‘grey coat’ type, of which the present painting is an example. The prototype for the grey coat portrait is a pastel, executed by Duplessis in 1783, and now located in the New York Public Library.

The present portrait is an autograph repetition with some possible studio participation of one of the first and most important paintings made by a French artist after Franklin’s arrival in Europe, the portrait by Joseph-Siffred Duplessis, exhibited in the Salon of 1779. That version, signed and dated 1778 is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Franklin’s fame remained so significant in Europe that Duplessis continued to paint the image even after the American’s death; Duplessis even exhibited another Portrait of Franklin in the Salon of 1801.

Family tradition identifies the sitter as Pierre de Buissy (1737-1787), a noble from Picardy. He appears withdrawn and distant, a reserve appropriate to his status, and also likely a product of Duplessis’s studio practice.

In 1775, a former soldier and personal friend of the king, Charles-Claude de Flahaut de la Billaderie, the Comte d’Angiviller, was made the Directeur des Batiments du Roi (Director of the King’s Buildings) - a kind of minister of fine arts. Through him more money was made available to commission paintings that were patriotic and didactic.