About the Item

Signed and dated, lower left: Par M. T./ Philiberte Montpetit/ 1794 Inscribed on the reverse of the stretcher: Mademoiselle Lange, de la Comédie Française. Provenance: Private Collection, Asunción, Paraguay. Marie Thérèse Vincent de Montpetit was the daughter of the 18th-century French inventor and painter Armand Vincent de Montpetit (1713–1800). Armand pioneered and patented a style of oil painting under plate glass that he termed éludorique—known in English as the eludoric method. He received numerous royal, government, and aristocratic commissions for works of this kind. After moving to Paris, Armand befriended the leading painters of the day, among them Fragonard and Boucher (who gifted him several drawings), and he was admitted to the Académie de Saint-Luc. Thérèse must have received her artistic training from her father. As an innovator, Armand was interested in the problem of fixing pastel, and he also actively produced pastels. Thérèse’s only documented work is a portrait of her father that she executed “à demi pastel” at the age of 10 and exhibited at the Salon de la Correspondance that began on 16 June 1785. This Salon formed the basis of the first museum founded in Paris—the Établissement de la Correspondance Générale sur les sciences et les arts (the Establishment for General Correspondence on the Sciences and the Arts), founded in 1779. These Salons were weekly temporary exhibitions of scientific, technical, and fine art objects, to which Armand Vincent de Montpetit was a frequent contributor. Two pastels by the artist, the only other known works by her, emerged on the art market in France in 2022 and are signed and dated with the same hand (Figs. 1-2). The present portrait is a newly discovered work by Thérèse Vincent de Montpetit and is her only known painting on canvas. It is prominently signed and date 1794, only two years after her marriage at the age of 17 to Jean-Philibert Dupuis and a year after their move to the city of Brest. The stretcher is inscribed with the identity of the sitter: Anne Françoise Elisabeth Lange, a well-known actress of the Comédie-Française and one of the Merveilleuses—the marvelous women—of the day. By 1794, Mademoiselle Lange was already a prominent performer and a sociétaire of the Comédie-Française. She was depicted by several important artists at the Salon of 1793, including by Jean-François Gilles Colson’s Sylvie (Fig. 3) and Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson’s Le Sommeil d’Endymion. Girodet later famously depicted her in his Venus at the Salon of 1799, which Lange disapproved of, and the painting was replaced in the final days of the Salon by the bitter Girodet with his scathing depiction of the actress as Danae (Fig. 4; now in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts). Mademoiselle Lange was imprisoned in late 1793 for her lead role in Paméla ou la Vertu récompensée (Pamela or Virtue Rewarded) by Nicolas-Louis François de Neufchâteau. This drama caused a stir with French officials due to its royalist overtones, and both the author and the actors were imprisoned on suspicion of their political sentiments. Lange spent time in both the Sainte-Pélagie and Pension Belhomme prisons in Paris and was freed after the ousting of Maximilien Robespierre on 9 Thermidor II, or 27 July 1794. Given the date of the painting, it is likely that Lange encountered Thérèse Vincent de Montpetit and was painted by her following her release.

Creator:
Thérèse Vincent de Montpetit (1775, French)
Creation Year:
1794
Dimensions:
Height: 21.88 in (55.58 cm)Width: 18.13 in (46.06 cm)
Medium:
Canvas,Oil
Movement & Style:
Old Masters
Period:
18th Century
Condition:
Gallery Location:
New York, NY
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU10210784742

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