Lot 85: Le Mariage Rompu

Etienne Aubry (Versailles 1745-1781 Paris) Le Mariage Rompu oil on canvas 35¼ x 46 in. (89.5 x 116.8 cm.)

Paris, Salon, 1777, no. 124.

Pillot collection, Chatou, by 1925.
Anonymous sale; Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 10 June 1963.

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 17.5% on the buyer's premium.
In a grand Baroque chapel, sixteen people have gathered for a young gentleman's marriage. The marriage has been interrupted at the last moment by his former lover and children. In the words of the 1777 Salon livret, 'the young man's father, touched by the sight of the unfortunate offspring, turns his son's gaze towards them. The son, feeling his heart break at the sight, gives in, and paternal love triumphs'. Le Mariage Rompu, exhibited at the Salon of 1777, was one of three paintings exhibited by Aubry that year, just four years before his untimely death. In terms of scale, sentiment and compositional complexity, this picture was by far the most ambitious, and won him the protection of France's most influential artbiter of taste, the surintendant des bâtiments, the Comte d'Angiviller.

Etienne Aubry first studied with Silvestre in his hometown of Versailles, and later with Vien. His first successes were in the field of portraiture, in which genre he was agréé at the Académie Royale in 1771. He was greatly admired for his portraits of Vassé and Hallé and in 1775 was reçu into the Academy. However, following the influence of such artists as Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Jean-Simeon Chardin, Aubry became entirely absorbed in Genre painting. Diderot, the philosophe who championed Greuze's drames bourgeois, wished to transform the Salons into schools of virtue; a place where artists would perpetuate noble deeds, where virture would be vindicated and vice stigmatised.

Le Mariage Rompu gives us a crucial insight into a movement which took on great importance in the eighteenth century: sensibilité. The origins of the movement are to be found in literary sources; in the writings of such philosophes as Rousseau, who believed that the Sciences, Letters and Arts could 'spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which men are burdened'. Aubry, like Rousseau, preached reform by idealising the simpler and more natural ways of modest, old-fashioned households. The drame bourgeois aimed to replace the old forms of French drama, which bore a more classicising vocabulary. The subject was always of domestic misfortunes, dealing with the everyday happenings of the middle class. Both Diderot and Rousseau believed in the need for, and possibility of, a sympathetic transport that would allow readers and beholders of works of art to exchange places with the characters of others. In a painting such as Le Mariage Rompu sensibilité prevails. The conventions of the established order are overturned and in its place a new morality installed; the natural bond of father, mother and child triumphs, despite their evident disparity of class.

This literary and intellectual movement found its most potent visual interpreter in the drame bourgeois of Greuze, an artist who was described as the 'surprise invader' by entering the Academy with Genre painting, and who was said to give the least noble style nobility. Greuze's La malédiction paternelle and Le fils puni (both Paris, Louvre) were painted in the same year as Le Mariage Rompu, and show the same preoccupation of the artist to paint with the aim 'to move, to educate and to improve' the viewer. Aubry's obituary noted how he 'in imitation of Greuze applied himself to enoble genre painting, and succeeded...by the pathos of the scenes, by the touching situation of the protagonists, by the virtuous subjects as well as the attractive handling of paint...and by a happy contrast of the passions, of sentiments and characters'. The obituary continued, 'In spite of the kind of enthusiasm which M. Greuze attracted, M. Aubry shared in this commendation, and his painting of Le Mariage Rompu, exhibited in the Salon of 1777 was one of the finest productions of this genre'.