JEAN-FRANÇOIS HUE (1751-1823) Lot n° 22

Marine in stormy weather Canvas Accents and old restorations Height 92 cm - Width 121 cm Provenance : Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, Me Cornette de Saint-Cyr, June 27, 1992, lot 51. Venet anonyme, Paris, Espace Tajan, December 12, 2005, lot 37. Born in 1751 in Saint-Arnoult near Chartres to a merchant father, Jean-Francois Hue's love of the arts dominated his childhood, and it was with an early determination to devote himself entirely to painting that he went to Paris to study drawing. He became a pupil of Doyen. He quickly made a name for himself and was admitted to the Académie at just 27. He was then appointed Painter to the King, succeeding the great Joseph Vernet to paint views of the Ports of France. To complete this project, the Constituante paid him no less than 10,000 livres. Vernet was one of those landscape painters who, in the last quarter of the 18th century, adopted new working methods, drawing and painting in direct contact with nature. An avid traveler (notably in Italy in 1785-86), he drew inspiration from his various peregrinations to produce a number of landscapes and seascapes, in which he favored the most spectacular effects of nature to accentuate the dramatic aspect of the narrative, as in the work we are presenting for sale here. He took part in the Salons from 1781 to 1824 (posthumously for this last edition) and is represented today in numerous public collections. Mr. Dréan's auction of the paintings in his cabinet, following his death in 1824, is that of an artist who was also a great collector throughout his life, and who, as the preface to the catalog states, was "profoundly knowledgeable about his art [...] and had used almost all his fortune" to build up a collection in which "nothing mediocre is to be found".