Lot 83: A young lady reading

Jean Raoux Montpellier 1677-1734 Paris
A young lady reading
indistinctly signed and dated 'Raoux 171*' (lower center, on the pill box)
oil on canvas
38¾ x 31¾ in. 98.4 x 80.6 cm.

Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, on loan (according to a label on the reverse).

Merle Oberon, Los Angeles, and by descent to the present owner.

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION


Raoux was born in Montpellier and was trained there by the portraitist Antoine Ranc. Moving to Paris at the start of the eighteenth century, Raoux became a pupil of Bon de Boullogne. In 1704, he won the Academy's Prix de Rome, and he spent the next three years in Italy, copying frescoes by Raphael and traveling to Florence and Padua (where he executed an Annunciation and a Visitation for the Cathedral, still in situ ). The time he spent in Venice was particularly important, as he not only studied the works of Titian and Veronese, but also met the Grand Prieur de Vendome, who would become his most important patron. Returning to Paris in the entourage of the Grand Prieur, Raoux was installed in lodgings in the Temple. Abandoning religious subjects, he began to produce the genre subjects and erotic themes that his clients demanded and upon which his posthumous reputation depends.

In 1717 Raoux was received at the Academy as a history painter in the same session with Antoine Watteau, and like Watteau he chose to pursue a career outside of official art circles. As a portrait and genre painter, Raoux specialized in bust-length depictions of pretty women in elaborate costumes, employing a fine finish, strong contrasts of light and shadows, and allegorical associations that recall the works of seventeenth-century Dutch painters such as Dou, Netscher and Schlacken. Indeed, Voltaire would describe Raoux as 'an uneven artist but one who when he was at his best equaled Rembrandt.'

A Young Lady Reading is a preeminent example of Raoux's mastery of Rembrandtesque lighting effects. The composition exists in several autograph replicas and numerous copies, including a celebrated version in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, which was donated to the museum in the 1860s by Louis La Caze. The present autograph version is masterfully painted, of superb quality, and is both signed and dated on the pill box. The present painting differs from the Louvre version in several small ways, notably in some of the drapery, in the presence of a rose in the young woman's décolletage, and in the shape of the pill box (here round; rectangular in the Louvre canvas).

Based on photos, Mr. Olivier Zeder is unable to endorse the attribution to the artist.