Lot 118: Jean-Germain Drouais (Paris 1763-1788 Rome)

Study of a male nude signed 'G. Drouais' (lower left) oil on canvas 221/2 x 20 in. (57 x 50.8 cm.) NOTES This and the following male academie are important rediscoveries by the rarest yet one of the most important French neoclassical painters. After brief apprenticeships with his father, the portrait painter Francois-Hubert Drouais and the history painter Nicolas-Guy Brenet, the young Jean-Germain decided in 1780 to work with Jacques-Louis David. After two failed attempts he won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1784 with Christ and the Woman of Canaan (Mus‚e du Louvre, Paris). Of this entry, a contemporary wrote, 'he astonished the entire Academy. Never had a student presented to the contest a work of such powerful conception and execution; and the most fervent wish was that such a prodigious talent could be sustained to the same degree of perfection. The enthusiasm that it generated was universal.' In the same year Drouais left for Italy with J-B Wicar and David. In Rome, Drouais enrolled in the French Academy, then under the direction of Louis Lagren‚e the Elder, and continued his studies with David, who was working on the Oath of the Horatii (Mus‚e du Louvre, Paris). As a later memoir from a contemporary recounts, Drouais assisted his master on this seminal picture, painting the arm of the third brother and the yellow garment of Sabina. David left Rome in 1785, but the two artists maintained a correspondence. Drouais remained in the Eternal City, where he painted his masterpiece, Marius at Minturnae (Mus‚e du Louvre, Paris), and Philocletes on Lemnos (Mus‚e des Beaux-Arts de Chartres). He died of smallpox in 1788, after a career that spanned a brief six years. Drouais's paintings are distinguished by superb draughtsmanship and a severity of style that led his work to be compared to that of Poussin. Had he lived longer he might have gone on to contest David's preeminence in Paris. As the master himself reflected on Drouais's untimely death, 'I have lost my emulation. He alone could trouble my sleep.' This and the following lot are exercises in the long-established academic practice of making painted studies of the posed male nude, as a means for history painters to perfect their craft. While these nudes were probably painted in Paris while Drouais was a student at the Royal Academy (obviously depicting a single model and surely made in quick succession), he subsequently painted two life-sized academies in Rome which, by dint of their large scale and intensity of expression, take on the quality of subject pictures: one, a Wounded Athlete (Mus‚e du Louvre, Paris) and the other a Seated Gladiator (Mus‚e des Beaux-Arts, Rouen). Like the present lots, both exploit the dramatic possibilities of strong, direct lighting and shallow but ambiguous space. The severity of profiles, the model's intense expressions, pronounced ankle bones, and the elongation of limbs are all characteristics of Drouais' handling of the human form, while the heavily scumbled technique -- especially pronounced in the backgrounds -- demonstrates his devotion to David's working methods.