Master Art

Louis Aubert is best known today for his drawings, which are usually genre scenes or portraits executed in pastels or coloured chalks. Many of his drawings are signed and often dated, others have born attributions to Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, while the influence of Etienne Jeaurat is also evident in his draughtsmanship. As Neil Jeffares has noted, however, Aubert’s drawings are ‘unlike the work of any other French pastellist of this period, and are closer to pastels of the Dutch school in theme.’

Some forty drawings by Louis Aubert are known today, several of which bear dates between 1742 and 1749, and examples are in the collections of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Musée Condé in Chantilly, the Louvre in Paris and the Albertina in Vienna, as well as in the Horvitz Collection in Cambridge, MA.