Gabriel Allegrain (paris 1679 – 1748)

Gabriel ALLEGRAIN (Paris 1679 – 1748) Pan and Syrinx Oil on canvas, 25.7 x 32.5 cm THE ARTIST Gabriel Allegrain is the son of Étienne Allegrain, also a landscape painter. He has two sisters. It was his father who trained him in painting. He married Anne-Madeleine Grandcerf on August 20, 1708. They have three children (a daughter and two sons) including Christophe-Gabriel, who will be a sculptor. In 1716 he was a member of the Royal Academy of Painting thanks to his painting The Flight into Egypt. THE WORK The painting we present is emblematic of the style of the landscaper of the Royal Academy Gabriel Allegrain. Son of Etienne Allegrain (1644-1736), also a landscaper 2 and academician, Gabriel Allegrain was born in Paris in 1679 and was probably trained by his father. Received as an academician in 1716 upon presentation of Landscape with The Flight into Egypt (nowadays at the Museum of Fine Arts in Bordeaux), the artist then multiplied a type of landscapes obeying an original style. Gabriel Allegrain had in fact distanced himself from his father's landscape formula. Imbued with the heroic landscapes of Nicolas Poussin, these had taken on a totally ordered form to the point of becoming practically abstract. The constituent ingredients of the “classical” landscape – trees, bushes, embankments, streams, mountains, architectural elements – were in fact arranged in an extremely calculated manner, even more so than if Poussin had been the author. It is in the reception piece that the motifs which will become recurrent in the art of Gabriel Allegrain appear. This is the case with the tomb surmounted by a contemporary-looking sculpture, the nearby basin, the estuary revealing in the distance a city at the foot of a rocky peak. This is precisely what we find in our table. The mythological scene that we recognize as that of Pan and Syrinx is in fact part of a river landscape on the edge of which we notice a tomb crowned by some divinity. The distant city serves to define a much more distant plane beyond which a mountain massif emerges.