Henri-joseph Dubouchet (1833 - 1909) Virgin And Child After Perugino

Circa 1880 - Black pencil on paper Our drawing, a copy of the Virgin and Child by Perugino (Ill.1) reproduces as closely as possible the elegance of the female modello with Botticelli features, the refinement of execution and the gentle atmospheric melancholy that emerges from the work painted by Le Pérugin. Bringing the faithful to the devotion from which emanates, in the words of the German art historian Ernst Gombrich, a serenity and a superterrestrial harmony, the refined line of Dubouchet knew how to seduce in his time Adolphe Thiers, who bequeathed to his suite several watercolor drawings by the artist in the Louvre Museum. Active in Lyon from 1855 to 1880, as well as in Paris in the 1870s, Henri-Joseph Dubouchet was a pupil of the historicist painter Jean-Georges Vibert at the School of Fine Arts in Lyon before obtaining, in 1860, a the age of twenty-seven, the Prix de Rome for engraving. While a newly bourgeois class wanted to become familiar with, enjoy and surround itself with art on a daily basis and before the advent of photography in the 1900s, Dubouchet knew how to take advantage of his stay in Rome in order to meet this need. by reproducing by hand the greatest Italian masterpieces which he specializes in. From 1866 to 1908 he exhibited at many Parisian salons his engravings, drawings and watercolors said to be interpretations of the great masters of the Renaissance, which were then wildly successful. It was in this movement that the first president of the Third Republic, Adolphe Thiers, decided to build up a collection of interpretations of “reduced images of all that is most beautiful in the world”. A child of Marseille, Adolphe Thiers formed his taste through collections from Avignon, Aix, Marseille and Italy. As part of the Colbertian patronage tradition, Thiers called on the best residents of the French Academy in Rome to copy the old masters, in particular those of the Florentine school of the 15th and 16th centuries.)