Antoine BOREL (1743-1810) The foundling. Oil on... Lot 19

Antoine BOREL (1743-1810) The foundling. Oil on canvas (Not lined). 81,5 x 101 cm. Old restorations. On the frame, an old label, "painted for Mr. le Cte de Bres... ? Provenance: Maurice Segoura Gallery, 1988; Anonymous sale, Lyon Brotteaux, Me Anaf, February 7, 1999, lot n° 69. Related work : Drawing: L'Enfant retrouvé. Pen, ink and wash. Signed. 34 x 42 cm. Château de Blérancourt, Franco-American museum. This painting illustrates a story told by Saint Jean de Crèvecœur, according to which the child of a family of colonists had gone astray, and an Indian found him thanks to the nose of his dog, and returned him to his parents. "Ah my friend," writes the author, "how beautiful and striking this scene was to contemplate, the spontaneous laughter, .... The spontaneous laughter, the paternal joy finally developed there under thousand different nuances, too sublime for my weak brush ". The episode does not appear in the first edition of Crèvecoeur's book published in England in 1782, Letters from an American Farmer. It is one of the additions made in the French version, Lettres d'un cultivateur américain (Paris, 1784), which was a huge success, both for its anecdotes of this kind and for its picturesque descriptions of life in North America. We can compare the painting with a pen-and-ink drawing by Antoine Borel, The Lost Child, kept in the Franco-American Museum of the Château de Blérancourt. The subject, identical, is treated in a similar way. The frieze composition, the variety of expressions and the rhetorical gestures evoke the art of Jean-Baptiste Greuze. The work illustrates the myth of the "good savage" by mixing the registers of history and genre painting. Antoine Borel is best known as a draftsman of allegories and subjects of morality in which he excels, this oil on canvas offers us a little known aspect of his work.