Jean-Baptiste Greuze

Previously known only through descriptions in 18th and 19th century French auction catalogues, this large and impressive sheet is a recently discovered and highly significant addition to the corpus of drawings by Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Given its large scale and degree of finish, it is very likely to have been made as a finished work of art for sale; indeed, it remains on its original mount. Furthermore, this Triumph of Silenus may be counted among the very few mythological subjects treated by Greuze as a draughtsman. As such, it may have been made sometime in the late 1760s, when the artist was contemplating what the subject of his morceau de reception for the Académie Royale should be. What may be a related composition by Greuze, a drawing also depicting the Bacchic figure of Silenus, appeared at auction in France in 1859. 

Among stylistically comparable, finished pen and wash drawings by Greuze are The Departure of the Young Savoyard in the collection of the Amsterdam Museum, The Return from the Wet Nurse in the British Museum in London and A Savoyard with a Dancing Doll in the Albertina in Vienna.

The present sheet has a distinguished provenance that can be traced back to the artist’s lifetime. The first known owner of this drawing was the 18th century French art dealer Vincent Donjeux (d.1793), about whom relatively little is known, although the Almanach général des marchands, négocians et commerçans de le France et de l’Europe of 1772 notes that he was also a painter, and that his premises were located on the rue des Fossés-Montmartre in Paris. Donjeux’s collection included a small but interesting group of Italian, Netherlandish and French drawings. He is also known to have worked in collaboration with the wealthy financier and collector Laurent Grimod de La Reynière – who owned a number of significant works by Greuze - in organizing an auction of paintings in February 1773. 

This Triumph of Silenus is next recorded in the collection of the amateur landscape painter, printmaker and draughtsman Baron Charles de Vèze (1788-1855), who exhibited at the Salons between 1837 and 1839. At Baron de Vèze’s posthumous sale in 1855 this drawing was acquired by the politician, scientist and writer François Hippolyte Walferdin (1795-1880). Walferdin formed a remarkable collection that was particularly notable for including some eighty paintings and over seven hundred drawings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Walferdin also owned at least fifty drawings by Greuze, most of which were dispersed in two auctions after his death in 1880. The present sheet, however, was one of fourteen drawings by Greuze sold by Walferdin at auction in Paris twenty years earlier.