Louis CHÉRON (Paris, 1655 – London, 1725)
Apollo and Daphne
Oil on canvas. H. 1.29; W. 1.65.
PROVENANCE:
· Probably Mrs. Pickering (and others) sale, London, 7-14 February 1729 (Getty Provenance Index, Cat. Br-A296), no. 3 (Louis Chéron. Apollo and Daphne; without dimensions, in accordance with the sale catalogues of this period);
· Possibly William Powlett sale, London, 17-18 March 1743 (Lugt983 and 585b), no. 59 (this time pendant to a Leda by the same artist; Louis Chéron, Apollo and Daphne (still without dimensions)); sold for £5.50 (the pair);
· Probably George Michael Moser sale, London, 19-27 May 1783 (Getty Provenance Index, cat. Br-A1363), no. 81 (Louis Chéron. Apollo and Daphne); sold for £3.50;
· Private collection Rome until 2022.
Long considered in the 20th century as belonging to the Roman school of the 17ththcentury, then to the entourage of Louis de Boullogne (1654-1733), the painting that we present turns out to be in fact an extremely rare testimony of the painter Louis Chéron.
Artist having recently been the subject of a retrospective (Fr. Marandet, Louis Chéron, 1655-1725, The Ambition of French Drawing (exhibition cat. Musée des Beaux-arts de Caen, 2021-2022), Deauville, 2021), we will briefly recall here the main achievements of his career.
Born into a family of painters and goldsmiths, Louis Chéron was awarded the annual "Grand Prix" of the Royal Academy in 1676, which allowed him to travel to Rome where he copied the paintings of Raphael and Annibale Carracci. He also went to Venice where he obtained a commission for the choir of the church of San Pantaleone (The Pool of Bethesda; in situ). Back in Paris, Louis Chéron notably painted two "Mays" for Notre-Dame Cathedral, but the revocation of the Edict of Nantes compromised the continuation of his work in France. A fervent Protestant, Louis Cheron decided to flee the kingdom for England in 1693. Thanks to the protection of the Duke of Montagu, former ambassador to the French court, he obtained major decorative commissions, that of his London residence Montagu House (formerly on the site of the current British Museum) and then that of his Country House in Boughton. He subsequently completed other large decorations, notably that of Chatsworth House, following its reconstruction by the Duke of Devonshire. However, growing competition with Louis Laguerre, another French history painter active in London, and the emergence of James Thornhill, led Louis Chéron to undertake other types of work. As an outstanding draftsman, he produced hundreds of illustrations for English publishers, starting with the most renowned of the time, Jacob Tonson. In 1720, Louis Chéron had yet to establish his own art school in London, the Saint-Martin's Lane Academy, whose originality was the introduction of nude women as models. An English artist as famous as William Hogarth was trained there in the early 1720s.
As we have shown, the absence of a market for “contemporary English painting” largely explains the strange distribution of Louis Chéron’s production (see Fr. Marandet, op. cit., p. 83-87). Either the artist painted "on a very large scale" (ceilings, gallery decor and stairwells), or he made drawings, which, a fortiori, were on an infinitely smaller scale. It remains nonetheless true that the artist produced easel paintings, although rare in his production.
Fig. 1. © Sotheby’s Fig. 2. © Sotheby’s
Others were also identified on the art market during the preparation of the Caen museum retrospective. This is the case for a Moses and the Brazen Serpent, of a Sacrifice of Isaac, of a Christ at Emmaus (Ibid., p. 86-87, repr.) or even of a Danae (Ibid., p. 248, repr.). Now, it is precisely to this very rare category – that of the “easel painting” – that our painting belongs. If we also consider the mythological subject in question, this one therefore appears to be the second of its kind to have been found after the Danae (which must in fact be the portrait of a nude woman as Danaë). It is also worth noting a pair of sketches of mythological subjects sold at Sotheby's, whose style is similar to that of our painting (Louis CHERON, Venus and Adonis/Diana and Endymion, signed, canvas, 50.5 x 36.5 cm, Sotheby's London 08/12/2005, lot no. 326) (fig. 1 & fig. 2). Several aspects, in our painting, confirm its classification under the name of Louis Chéron. We note first that Daphne's legs are articulated exactly like those of Hermaphroditus as he appears in one of the drawings in the "Derby Album" of the British Museum (Ibid., p. 95, fig. 100;fig.3. Let us also note the same kind of large, oblique tree trunks without any branching. We can also compare our table to the Danae, which reveals a properly plastic sense just as pronounced. Tightened at the knees, the legs of the Danae move away from each other as you go down towards the feet. One of the putti lying on the ground, in our painting, adopts exactly this strange pose at the level of the legs. The yield of the sky is the other striking common point between the two paintings (a remark which also applies, moreover, to Christ at Emmaus by Louis Chéron cited above), but also with the pair sold at Sotheby's in 2005 (Fig. 1 & Fig. 2). We notice the same type of twilight sky covered with golden clouds. What's more, these clouds are painted with the same sketched touch, the brush following a slightly undulating path. Given the style and the canons of the figures, our painting must be dated around 1720, which saw Louis Chéron at the height of his career with the founding of his own art school.
FIG. 3. © British Museum
It is worth noting the extremely rare nature of our Apollo and Daphne, a single painting by Louis Chéron preserved in French museums and representing The Prophet Agabus predicting Saint Paul's misfortunes (Museum of Fine Arts of Caen), it would be preparatory to the May of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris or one of these "little Mays" as they were called in the 18th century.
We thank François Marandet for confirming the authenticity of the painting.
DETAIL PHOTOGRAPHS
