Jean Augustin Franquelin (workshop Of) - 19th Century - Disquiet

This Oil on Canvas surrounded by a 19th century gilded wooden frame, and surrounded by Restoration-style friezes, shows us a seemingly banal genre scene.

A woman on the beach, sad, looks into the distance into the sea, desperately waiting for someone or something to come to her, her young child under her arm, nestled against her breast. She is leaning on a boat, which could mean that she is waiting for her fisherman husband who has gone to sea. Engravings dating from the mid-19th century by Rollet show us the exact same subject, probably the original of a painting that has been lost, digitized by the departmental archives of the Somme and the MBA in Angers. The engravings are called "l'Inquiétude".

To understand the attribution to the workshop of Jean Augustin Franquelin, and the signature "P. Caneta" at the bottom right, that of one of his potential students, we must return to the artist's earlier works. This subject is similar to a "pensive young woman with a crown of flowers", attributed to him following a sale in 2005, to "the young mother", kept at the Musée de Grenoble and produced by Franquelin before 1834, but especially to "Evirchoma", a canvas presented at the Salon of 1824 by Franquelin. This Parisian painter exhibited at the Salon from 1819 to 1839.

In the first volume of "Ossian in France" published in 1917, Professor Paul Van Tieghem summarizes the story of Evirchoma in these words: "And above all, how could a sensitive soul not be delightfully moved to see the beautiful Evir-Choma, whom a dream had warned, embark alone with her child to find her husband, see him on the beach exhausted with fatigue and covered in wounds, and offer him her breast to feed him with her milk, as his mother Crisollis had once fed her husband Casdu-Conglas? When Gaul refuses, she tries to carry him on her shoulders to the skiff, but she succumbs under the effort, and they both perish; only the child survives, and he is found in the boat, rocked by the waves." The genre scene presented here, of a woman with a blue headband, is therefore obviously not mythological, but takes on the atmosphere of the Ossianic dream inherited from Franquelin's previous works.

Despite the neoclassicism of Regnault, his master, Franquelin's exterior compositions are romantic, with often stormy skies, as here. The reefs, the holey, empty boat, from which a fishing line falls, the tear escaping under the woman's eye, the tension is palpable. The scene is pathetic, but not as exotic as the compositions of his rival Louis Léopold Robert.

Final Attribution: Sketch or studio copy of a work presented at the Salon of 1827, under the name "the sailor's widow", number 415, by Franquelin.