PERRONNEAU, Jean-Baptiste

Perronneau’s pastels show less technical virtuosity than Maurice Quentin de La Tour’s, perhaps quite deliberately. Something of a preparation remains in the finished portrait, giving a gritty, unflattering, yet forceful character to his work. He is less concerned with simulating the texture of skin or hair, for example, than with lively drawing in pastel; the strokes remain, and add their vibrancy to Perronneau’s sharp observation. His sitters are seldom smiling or exuding a charming vitality: if anything, they often seem rather heavy and disagreeable - but very convincing.

This is the portrait of a rich textile manufacturer, established at Abbeville, Abraham Van Robais (1698-1779).

Laurent Cars (1699-1771) was a French printmaker, print publisher and print-seller. He was among the best reproductive engravers of his time.

This delightful sitter with her pierced ear is the daughter of the engraver Gabriel Huquier, whom Perronneau had painted eights months before.

Indications on the verso identify the sitter as Augustin Tassin de La Renardi�re, lieutenant in Sologne, and �chevin of Orl�ans in 1777-78, who was later secretary to the king in 1781 and received knighthood.

At the Salon of 1769 Perronneau exhibited two oil paintings and several pastels, including the portrait of the print collector and bibliophile Charles le Normant du Coudray in a gown of blue flowered silk.

This early pastel by Perronneau was exhibited at the Salon of 1747.

Gabriel Huquier was a French draughtsman, engraver and merchant of prints. He executed a large number of engravings after Boucher, Watteau, Gillot, and other French masters, and he is distinguished by his deep knowledge in arts.

Jacques Cazotte (1719-1792), was a French author whose most popular work was the Diable amoureux (1772), a fantastic tale in which the hero raises the devil.

This portrait of the animal painter Jean-Baptiste Oudry, representing him before a sketch of hunting dogs, was the artist’s “morceau de r�ception” at the Acad�mie royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1753.

This type of portrait, of a person reading, was characteristic of the late Rococo and enabled the artist to play on the model’s shifting shades of mood, between seriousness and thoughtful reverie. In one of his finest painted works, Perronneau demonstrates a fine feeling for individuality that may have been assisted by his close knowledge of the sitter, who was possibly the artist’s younger brother.

The sitter of this portrait is probably Madame Blondel d’Azincourt, dressed in a blue polka dot cape and fur muff. She was the wife of Barth�l�my Augustin Blondel d’Azincourt, a decorated lieutenant colonel of the war of the Austrian Succession and one of the most distinguished art collectors in 18th century Paris. The pendant of the painting depicts her husband.

Unlike Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Perronneau was also an adept at using oil paint, achieving some of his best portraits in this medium. Outstanding is the Portrait of a Man of 1766 at Dublin, as pungent and penetrating as a Goya portrait. The hand is painted almost roughly; the lace is suggested rather than painstakingly detailed; and the clever, challengingly shrewd face twists round with disconcerting abruptness, as if defying the spectator to slip by.

Perronneau studied engraving with Laurent Cars and then painting with Natoire. He was accepted by the Acad�mie Royale in 1746 and became a full member 1753. But his rivalry with the pastellist Quentin de La Tour led him to seek a clientele outside Paris, especially it seems in Orl�ans. He painted mostly the senior officials, and the upper bourgeoisie, engineers, doctors and clergy. On the other hand he seems to have been particularly favoured and respected by his own colleagues, and painted portraits of Gilequian, Drouais and Oudry and of the engravers Cars and Huquier, the sculptor Adam the elder, the architects Chevotet and Soyer. His strong firm almost coarse (and maybe rather less flattering) style may have been appreciated better by these connoisseurs than the slightly slicker and more perfectionist style of La Tour, who seems to have gone out of his way to sabotage the career of this younger artist.

There is a group of thirteen portraits in the Mus�e des Beaux-Arts d’Orl�ans, among them the portrait of Daniel Jousse (1704-1781), a famous legal expert who published about twenty volumes on criminal law.