Lot 18: Interior of an Inn with elegant figures eating and artisans playing cards in the background; and Interior of an Inn with mixed company taking tea

Léonard Defrance (Liege 1735-1805) Interior of an Inn with elegant figures eating and artisans playing cards in the background; and Interior of an Inn with mixed company taking tea the first signed 'L.Defrance de Liege' (lower right); the second signed 'L.Defrance/de Liege' (on the step, lower right) oil on panel 20 x 26 7/8 in. (50.8 x 68.4 cm.) a pair (2)

Liège, Exposition de l'art ancien au Pays de Liège, Catalogue général, 1905, no. 1148.
Amsterdam, Jacques Goudstikker Gallery, Catalogue des Nouvelles Acquisitions de la Collection Goudstikker, April-May 1930, nos. 15 and 16.
Rotterdam, Rotterdamsche Kunstkring, Catalogus der Tentoonstelling van Schilderijen en Antiquiteiten geexposeerd door den Kunsthandel J. Goudstikker N.V., Amsterdam, 17 December 1936-10 January 1937, no. 17.
The Mauritshuis, The Hague, on loan since 1948?
Liège, Musée de l'Art wallon et de l'Evolution culturelle de la Wallonie, Le Siècle des Luminières dans la Principauté de Liège, October-December, 1980, nos. 396-7.
Maastricht, Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, inv. no. 542, on loan from at least 1958.

Eugène Van Overloop (1847-1926).
Baron August Janssen, Brussels; his sale, Frederik Muller, Amsterdam, 26 April 1927, lot 25.
F.J.E. Horstmann, Oud Clingendael Castle; his sale, Frederik Muller, Amsterdam, 19 November 1929, lot 16.
with Jacques Goudstikker, Amsterdam, November 1929.
Looted by the Nazi authorities, July 1940.
Recovered by the Allies, 1945.
in the custody of the Dutch Government.
Restituted in February 2006 to the heir of Jacques Goudstikker.

One of the most interesting Franco-Flemish painters of the Enlightenment, Léonard Defrance achieved considerable success in Paris in the 1780s and 1790s. As an outspoken political and social progressive - he was hounded by the Inquisition for his interest in philosophy - Defrance was forced to flee his native Liège for exile in Paris on several occasions following the installation of the severely repressive Prince-Bishop of Liège, Constantine-Francois de Haensbroech in 1784. Having trained in his youth under Laurent Pecheux at the Académie de France à Rome, Defrance was well prepared to compete in the Parisian art market and exhibited at the Paris Salons of 1786 and 1787, and at the subsequent Salons Revolutionnaire of 1791 and 1793. After the 1789 Revolution he became a member of the Assemblée Liègoise from 1792 to 1794 and of the Conseil Municipal in 1800.

Although many of his patrons were members of the clergy, Defrance's art was marked by his interest in the philosophical and scientific, and the best-known of his many portraits is of the Toulouse astronomer Antoine Darquier at work (c.1763, Private collection). Indeed, Defrance's finest paintings are those celebrating technological and intellectual progress and showing men and modern machinery at work, for example the Visit to the Tobacco Factory, and Interior of a Foundry (both in the Musée de l'Art Wallon, Liège), and the Interior of the Plomteux Printing Plant (the publishers of the works of the philisophe Helvetius; private collection). With his fascination for science, technology and philosophy, and his particular skill in conveying the psychological drama offered by intense, artificial lighting effects, Defrance proves a Franco-Flemish alternative to his British contemporary Joseph Wright of Derby. Unlike Wright of Derby, however, Defrance specialized in multifigural genre scenes on a very small scale that reflect his familiarity with the works of the 17th-century Dutch masters, notably David Teniers, whose paintings he studied in depth on a 1773 trip to the Netherlands.

Not surprisingly, given the radical bend of his politics, Defrance occasionally painted genre and allegorical subjects that depicted the events and characters of the French Revolution. The present pair of paintings from the Goudstikker collection had long been thought to depict political prisoners in the Temple or another Paris jail, but a close examination of them fails to disclose the particularities of costume or setting that would support such an identification (for example, none of the windows are barred and, as Dehousse, Pacco and Pauchen note in their catalogue raisonné (loc. cit.), the pictures appear to slightly antedate 1789, as one can observe from the costumes. These charming and vigorously painted pictures seem to depict, instead, men and women of various stations and classes gathering for food, drink and revelry in the interior of a coaching inn or post house, in the tradition of 17th-century Dutch painters like Teniers, Steen and Ostade, but ornamented and updated with the fashions of contemporary France. Similar scenes were popular with fellow Franco-Flemish painters Louis and F.-L.-J. Watteau de Lille. Five sheets of drawings, and one counterproof (all in red chalk) by Defrance have been identified as bearing studies for figures in the two compositions (see fig. 1; and see Dehousse, Pacco and Pauchen, op. cit., ill. nos. 96 a,b,c and 97 a,b,c,).