FRENCH SCHOOL 18th CENTURY, THE SURPRISED LOVERS , GOUACHE MINIATURE CIRCA 1770

TECHNIQUE: Watercolor and gouache on velum, protected under glass

ARSTIST:

SIGNED:

FRAME : Original gilded wood frame.

PORTRAIT SIZE: 11,5x8,5cm

FRAME SIZE: 15x12cm

DESCRIPTION :

Miniature whose scene seems to lie at the edge of the sea. Indeed we can see waves in the foreground and a vast stretch of water running along a rocky coast far to the horizon.

On rocks, a completely naked couple, is lying on pieces of fabric (pink for her, blue for him). A bearded man holding a Pan flute, hidden in the canopies, at the top of a cliff. Beneath that cliff, sheep and oxen rest.

At the top of the rocky flanks, a volcano erupts.

Does the scene have a mythological source ? the loves of Venus and Adonis (as in the painting of Jean François de Troy). Is the man with the Pan flute is Pan himself surprising Syrinx ? (but he is devoid of horns). Is the voyeur just a simple shepherd (hence the animals), surprising a couple after the bath ? But then what is the symbolic of the erupted volcano ?

Mythological or not, all these invocations (Pan voyeur, the eruption, the suggestive position of the couple and their nudity...), places this little work, of an obvious eroticism, in the line of the works of Jacques Charlier or Carl Gustav Klingstedt. Erotic miniatures sought and fervently collected especially under the Regency and the reign of Louis XV.


CONDITION: Very good original condition. Not opened, some dust, tiny lost on paint on lower border

BIBLIOGRAPHY: