JEAN-MARC NATTIER (Paris, 1685-1766) Portrait... Lot 49

JEAN-MARC NATTIER (Paris, 1685-1766) Portrait of Marie-Geneviève Gaudart de Laverdine, 1734. Signed on the right "Nattier Pinxit/1734" Old label on the back on the frame. Height 81 cm, width 65 cm. Carved and gilt wood frame, French work of the Louis XV period. Provenance: preserved in the family of the model since the origin, who transmitted by tradition this identification. A portrait of Marie Geneviève de Guillebon, wife of Gaudard de Laverdine, by Jean Marc Nattier. Canvas. Signed and dated 1734. Unpublished, this beautiful feminine portrait easily fits into Nattier's career alongside those of Marie-Elisabeth de Rouvray de Saint-Simon (1739, private collection) or of the marquise Emilie du Châtelet (1743, location unknown). The pose is similar. He invented a pyramidal composition of interlocking lozenges, the first around the face, then another drawn by the neckline and the sides of the veil that fall on the shoulders. This subtle movement of the headdress gives all its originality to our painting. Jean Raoux had made the female portrait "as a vestal virgin" fashionable in the 1720s, which, in a somewhat paradoxical twist, equated the Roman priestesses of the sacred fire with the young married women who were the guardians of the conjugal home. Nattier takes up the concept here. He paints the model realistically, without using a mythological transvestite or, as is often the case, a "Nattier-blue" drapery, but a surprisingly dynamic colour contrast. The very soft range around the face, probably revealing the model's serene character, rendering a pearly white broken by a lime tone, different shades of pink, is dynamited at the bottom by a bright red cloak, trimmed with gold embroidery. The label on the frame takes us back to the 18th century aristocracy of Berry. The model was the daughter of Pierrre de Guillebon, sieur de Boissy, lieutenant general of the hunts of the duchy of Orleans, and of Madeleine Guinebaud. Born in Bourges around 1713, Marie-Geneviève married Pierre Gaudart de Laverdine (1701-1765) on 14 July 1729 in Orléans, and had seven children: Marie-Anne in 1733, Françoise in 1734, Anne-Geneviève in 1735, Pierre in 1736, Etienne in 1737, Catherine in 1740, Benjamin in 1742 and Prosper (Gaudart de Verteuil) in 1743 (according to the Gaudart family tree made by Antoine Gaudart on the Geneanet website). The notoriety of her husband's family goes back to the beginning of the 15th century, when the merchant Pierre Godart became a companion of Jacques Coeur. Later, Étienne Gaudart, merchant, alderman of Bourges, acquired in 1678 the seigneury of Verdines, and was ennobled in 1689 thanks to the office of treasurer of France. His son and his grandson, Marie-Geneviève's husband, inherited this office of treasurer. The latter was also commissioner of the Ponts et Chaussées of the Berry region and lived in the parish of Saint-Ursin in Bourges. The neoclassical painter Alphonse Gaudar de Laverdine (1780-1804), Grand Prix de Rome 1799, was the grandson of our model (an exhibition was dedicated to him in Châteauroux in 1999). Nattier is the greatest portraitist of the Louis XV period. Even if he had already been noticed at the beginning of the century by Louis XIV and Tsar Peter the Great, it is in the second third of the 18th century that he gave the full measure of his talent. The son of a painter, he was admitted to the Royal Academy in 1713 and elected a member five years later. In the 1730s, he painted many half-body effigies, such as this canvas, each time varying the pose or framing. His very soft skin tones and the rendering of textures and fabrics ensured him an important clientele. He was then the official portraitist of the Orleans family. It was in the following decades, 1740 and 1750, that he produced the famous portraits of the royal family at Versailles.