On the eve of departure - Labille-Guiard’s portrait of the marquise de La Valette, circa 1786-7

 

Adapted from Christie's' lot essay:

Labille-Guiard’s portrait depicts the elegant young marquise de La Valette playing a harp. Marie-Thérèse-Odile née Flahaut de La Billarderie (1761 - 29 November 1788), known as Odile, was twenty-five or twenty-six years old when she sat to the artist. She was born into a minor French noble family originating in Picardy and notable for its tradition of military service dating back to the sixteenth century; her father was a military officer with strong familial ties to those connected with the French court. In 1780, at the age of nineteen, she married Jean-Baptiste de La Valette (1746 - 20 February 1788), the marquis de La Valette and marquis de Pérodon. The couple had two children: Jean-Louis-Achille de La Valette-Pérodon (1781 - 1811) and Marie-Louise-Caroline-Auguste de La Valette (1783 - 1836). Her husband inherited vast sugar plantations and other considerable lands in the French colony of Saint-Domingue - present-day Haiti - and in 1786 - after entrusting their two young children to the care of her parents at the Château de Saint-Rémy-en-l’Eau, the family’s ancestral estate - the couple left France for Saint-Domingue to oversee their interests on the island. Their stay in the Caribbean proved brief and tragic. Having sold some of their island properties, their fortune was stolen when the ship carrying them was pirated in the harbor of Port-au-Prince. Her husband died as a result of the attack, likely murdered. Pregnant with the couple’s third child, she survived the attack and gave birth in her residence at Petite-Rivière-de-l’Artibonite. The child, a daughter named Aglaé-Marie-Charlotte-Elisabeth-Joséphine-Claudine de La Valette (1788 - 1790), died in infancy on the island. But the young marquise, herself, had died at her Caribbean home two years before, at the age of just twenty-seven years old.

Labille-Guiard’s portrait of the marquise was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1787, where it was listed in the livret as number 113 and was identified as portraying "M. de la Marquise de la Valette, pinçant de la harpe". Although it is possible that the painting could have been based on a drawing and executed after the sitter’s departure from France, it is more likely that she sat to the artist in 1786 before she undertook the journey. 

The Salon of 1787, where the present portrait was exhibited, marked the pinnacle of Labille-Guiard’s career. Of the nine identified portraits that the artist showed that year, two were of Mesdames, the two surviving unmarried aunts of the king; the life-size, full-length portrait of Madame Adélaïde was the most admired and discussed painting of the exhibition, after Jacques-Louis David’s "Death of Socrates." So pleased with the portraits were Mesdames that days before the opening of the Salon they had the artist appointed "Peintre de ces Princesses" - their official artist - a title which brought her esteem as well as further prestigious commissions.

Strike a pose - portraits by Franz Xaver Setzer

 

Maria Jeritza in the title role of Turandot, 1926. 

Opera singer and sculptor Helge Lindberg, circa 1920.

Betty Fischer in Die Königin, 1927.

 Toni Birkmeyer in Prinz Karneval, 1927.

Gusti Pichler as Sulamith in Josefslegende, 1922.

Carina Ari (Maria Karina Viktoria Jansson) in "Anitra’s Dance," 1922. Two images.

Nora Gregor as Thaisa in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, 1937.

Conrad Veidt as Cesare in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920.

Grete Wiesenthal in Schwingen im Licht, 1924.

Leopoldine Konstantin in Das Weib und der Hampelmann, 1918.

Lena Amsel, 1918.

Mizzi Günther, 1918.

Riki Raab in Der Liebeszauber, 1929. Two images.

Raoul Aslan as Emperor Joseph II, 1937.

Marie Gutheil-Schoder - the photographer's wife - in the title role of Carmen, circa 1922.

Grete Wiesenthal in Der Taugenichts in Wien, 1930.

Hedy Pfundmayr in Ravel, 1923.

Maria Jeritza in the title role of Turandot, 1926. Two images.

Maria Ley, 1925.

Ellen Petz with her ensemble, circa 1920s.

Elsie Altmann-Loos as Miss Mabel Gibson in Die Zirkusprinzessin, 1926.

 Walter Slezak, circa 1922.

Hedy Pfundmayr in Schéhérazade, 1923.

Conrad Veidt as Cesare in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920.

Toni Birkmeyer, 1923.

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Franz Xaver Setzer (born Franz Anton Adolf Setzer; 6 August 1886, Vienna – 10 January 1939, Vienna), Austrian photographer. After receiving his training at the Imperial Royal Institute of Prints and Drawings, he founded his own studio in 1909. The well-lit studio in the attic of the Museumstrasse 5 in the 7th district in Vienna was - as an early advertising card described - equipped with "a lift and a telephone", and personalities from the theatre and opera, music and literary scenes became enthusiastic patrons. In 1917 he received the Voigtländer Medal of the Photographic Society. He married the opera singer Marie Gutheil-Schoder in 1920, and this marriage expanded his social position; in addition to those in the Arts, aristocrats and politicians and the like were increasingly included among his clientele. In spite of competing for the same portrait subjects, it appears he had friendly relationships with his contemporary photographic colleagues, such as Madame d'Ora and Arthur Benda. The global economic crisis of the 1930s had a serious impact on his business and, also dealing with health concerns, he withdrew from the daily running of the studio. Marie Karoline Tschiedel, who had been his assistant for more than a decade, became the technical director of the studio in 1934, and increasingly assumed overall responsibility for the business. Setzer died at the age of fifty-two in 1939. Tschiedel took over the studio from his heirs and continued it under the name Setzer-Tschiedel until 1980.

Sensation, times five - The Five Senses, by Philippe Mercier, circa 1744-47

 

Depictions of the Five Senses - usually as a set of five separate pieces - have been a frequent subject for artists through the centuries, a chance to display their skill and imagination. Each painting in Mercier's set is composed as a "conversation piece"; all are now in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art. It appears that there are at least two other versions of this series, and it has been suggested that the present canvases may be the collaborative work of Mercier and his second wife, Dorothy, herself a painter.

The Sense of Hearing.

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The Sense of Taste.

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The Sense of Sight.

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The Sense of Smell.

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The Sense of Touch.

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Philippe Mercier (also spelled Philip Mercier; circa 1689-91, Berlin – 18 July 1760, London), German artist of French Huguenot descent active in England for most of his working life. Considered one of the earliest practitioners of an identifiable Rococo style, he is credited with influencing early eighteenth-century English artists. The son of a Huguenot tapestry-worker, he studied painting at the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin, and then under Antoine Pesne, who had arrived in Berlin in 1710. Later, he travelled in Italy and France before arriving in London - "recommended by the Court at Hannover" - probably in 1716; he married in London three year later. He was appointed principal painter and librarian to the Prince and Princess of Wales at their independent establishment in Leicester Fields, and he painted various portraits of his patron's immediate and extended family, as well as taking commissions from the nobility and gentry. In 1736 he fell out of favor at Court and was replaced as principal painter to Frederick Prince of Wales by John Ellys. He then took rooms in Covent Garden before relocating to York in 1739. There he focused on "fancy" pictures, frequently concerned with domestic virtue, as well as taking on commissions for portraits. He remained in York for more than ten years before returning to London in 1751. The following year he traveled to Portugal at the request of several English merchants, but did not remain there long, however, before returning to London, where he died in 1760 at the age of about seventy.

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His daughter Charlotte was also an artist early in her life. But she turned to "a life of dissolution" and died in the St. James Workhouse two years after her father's death.