Jean-Démosthène DUGOURC

Dated 1776, this highly finished drawing is an early work by Jean-Démosthène Dugourc. It depicts Beauty, crowned by Love, who sacrifices herself to the Three Graces on the right, while she rewards Talent – personified by figures representing Music, Painting and Military Courage – at her feet. The present sheet remains unconnected with any known work by Dugourc and, with its elaborately decorated mount, may well have been intended as an autonomous work of art in its own right, for presentation or sale to a collector. 

However, it has also been tentatively suggested that this drawing might be related to Dugourc’s designs for the interior of the Château de Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne, constructed by the artist’s brother-in-law Bélanger for the Comte d’Artois, brother of Louis XV. Nicknamed the ‘Folie d’Artois’, Bagatelle was a Neoclassical-style small pleasure pavilion famously built over sixty-four days in the autumn of 1777. (The Comte d’Artois thereby won a bet that he had made with his sister-in-law Marie Antoinette, who had wagered that the new château could not be completed in less than three months.) Some written descriptions of the decoration of Château de Bagatelle describe a set of painted doors by Dugourc depicting the Progress of Love in the two boudoirs on the first floor of the pavilion, alongside a series of six large, vertical Italianate landscape paintings by Hubert Robert. However, almost all of the original painted decorations in the Château de Bagatelle are no longer in situ, and much has been lost.

The present sheet can be grouped with a small number of stylistically comparable and equally highly finished oval drawings by Dugourc, each signed and dated 1776. A group of five pen and ink drawings illustrating the story of Cupid and Psyche, with similarly inscribed mounts, were formerly in the collections of Jean Masson and Florence J. Gould, while a pair of oval drawings of L’Amour enchaîne par les Grâces and Les Grâces couronnées par l’Amour appeared at auction in Paris in 1919. The late 19th century French collector Jean Masson’s fine group of ornamental drawings and prints, much of which was bequeathed  to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, included two further oval drawings of this type by Dugourc, depicting Le Désir et le Mystère conduisant la Jeunesse à l’Amour and Les Grâces conduisant l’Amour à la Fidelité and both dated 1776, which were sold at auction in 1923. Like the present sheet, all of these drawings executed in 1776 may have been intended as designs for a now-lost decorative scheme in the Château de Bagatelle, completed the following year.