Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont Sold at Auction Prices

Gabriel-Pierre-Martin Dumont (French, 1720-1791),

Gabriel-Pierre-Martin Dumont (French, 1720-1791), "Section Drawing of a Church Project, to be Built on a Greek-Cross Plan " c. 1750s/1760s, ink, gray and light rose washes, on cream-colored laid paper, unsigned, 12 1/4 x 18 3/4 in., fixed to a mount of similar paper, 15 1/2 x 21 in., both without watermarks Provenance: James R. Lamantia Jr., New Orleans and New York. Note : This extremely fine drawing is clearly preparatory to an engraving intended to be published, perhaps in Dumont's famous Recueil de Plusieurs Parties d'Architecture, probably in the penultimate section, devoted to ""Les Églises"" (1761/1767). A few of the prints included in that part of his celebrated compendium have dates as early as 1751 and 1752, so that this exceptional sheet might have been drawn as early as mid-century. It shows-above and inside its uniform Tuscan order-an altogether original and exciting vaulting system, in which the barrel-vaults over the arms of the Greek cross, the central hemispherical dome (capped by a steeper pointed shell as a protection against the weather), and the great half-dome over the apse, are all isolated behind immensely high perimeter walls, articulated on the exterior with Tuscan pilasters, a full cornice, and attic (with a semicircular pediment over the façade). A Parisian, Dumont won the Prix de Rome and from 1742 to 1746 worked at the Académie de France there, being elected in the latter year to the Accademia di San Luca (as well as to the academies in Florence and Bologna). He returned to Rome in 1750 with his lifelong friend (and the famous architect of ""le Panthéon"" or Ste-Geneviève in Paris), Jacques-Germain Soufflot (1713-1780); the two made a pioneering visit to the Greek temples at Paestum near Naples, which Soufflot published with many of Dumont's plates in 1764 (and of which the latter issued his own series in 1769). Such detailed, accurate, and highly finished images as this design set the standard for instruction-for example by Jacques-François Blondel (1705-1774), who used the three volumes of the Recueil in his courses-at the Académie d'Architecture in Paris, in which Dumont was also a Professor. References: Marie-Félicie Pérez, ""Dumont,"" Grove Dictionary of Art, Jane Turner, ed., London, 1996, 34 vols., vol. 9, pp. 389-390; Dora Wiebenson and Claire Baines, The Mark J. Millard Architectural Collection: vol. 1, French Books, Washington and New York, 1993, pp. 162-172, no. 66."