Workshop Of Jean-françois De Troy (paris, 1679 - Rome, 1752), The Return From The Dance

Workshop of Jean-François de Troy (Paris, 1679 - Rome, 1752)

The return from the dance

Oil on canvas, cm 46 x 37,5

With frame, cm 58 x 66

The Paris Salon of 1737 definitively consecrated Jean-François de Troy as a precious guardian of the Parisian society of the time. An artist capable of the most tireless opulence and excellent portraitist, de Troy converted the genre of the classic gallant portrait from interior to true tableaux de mode. Celebrating truthfully the idle aristocracy of the time, the artist was able to emphasize the sumptuous interiors and the rustling clothes of his characters sighing for their liveliness and sociability, without distorting the compositions through class judgment and visual theatricalization.

At the Salon of 1737, De Troy exhibited a pair of paintings entitled La toilette/La preparazione al ballo and Dopo il ballo. Immediately declared the best work of de Troy, the paintings were collected in the collection within the Cabinet Prousteau, at the time owned by the captain of the same name of the city guard of Paris. Following the partial dismemberment of the Cabinet cause sale (1769), the scene depicting the preparation for the dance was after several passages in the collections of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, while the complementary return from the party was lost. Fortunately, the Mercure de France, a literary publication and later publishing house, had hosted in the first volume published in 1758 a pair of engravings depicting the two paintings, by the hand of Jacques-Firmin Beauvarlet (1737-1797). Precious and rare testimony of the second and lost painting, this canvas therefore reproposes the providential engraving, now also appreciable in etching at Villa Vigoni di Menaggio and engraving by the bulldog at the Cabinet drawings and prints (Corsini fund) of the National Institute for Graphics.