The Adoration Of The Magi. Guillaume Dumee (fontainebleau 1571 – Paris 1646)

Oil on copper in octagonal shape.
Carved and gilded wooden frame decorated with cherub heads in the corners. Total dimensions with frame: 46 x 46 cm. The copper alone: 35.3 x 36.5 cm
This precious little painting, which we can date from the beginning of the 17th century, was executed by Guillaume Dumee (Fontainebleau 1571 – Paris 1646).
It represents the adoration of the Magi who come to bring the three gifts (gold, frankincense and myrrh) to the child Jesus. In the iconographic tradition Gaspard, with Asian features, offers incense, Melchior, represented as a white and bearded old man, gold, and Balthazar, with black skin, myrrh. This painting is in very good original condition. The colors remained very fresh and delicate. The first mentions of Guillaume Dumée present him as a disciple of Toussaint Dubreuil. The two artists worked together on the decorations of the Château Neuf in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, illustrating with more than seventy-eight paintings Ronsard's Franciade and Ovid's Metamorphoses. Friendship also bound them, and Dubreuil became godfather to Toussaint Dumée, one of Guillaume's sons. A document of February 3, 1605 attests that on the death of Dubreuil, Dumée was charged with continuing the “maintenance” of the work of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. In the early 1610s, we find Guillaume Dumée with Marie de Médicis. He participated in the decoration of the Cabinet of the Queen of the Louvre, inspired by the "Jerusalem delivered" by the poet Le Tasse (1581). Dumée produced three of the Cabinet's ten paintings, alongside Gabriel Honnet, Ambroise Dubois and Jacob Bunel. Drawings of this project (notably kept at the École des Beaux-Arts) allow us to better understand his style, still attached to the School of Fontainebleau, but with more freedom than some of his contemporaries. Like Toussaint Dubreuil a few years earlier, Guillaume Dumée exercised from January 1610 the office of “ordinary painter for the tapestries of the king”, in collaboration with Laurent Guyot. In particular, he designed the cartoons for the famous tapestry of Pastor Fido commissioned by Marie de Médicis, and now kept at the Château de Chambord. The inventory after death of Guillaume Dumée, drawn up by his son on January 8, 1646 and recently found by Jean Coural, mentions the existence in his studio of several portraits. They would confirm the painter's activity as a portraitist alongside his work as a decorator. The Portrait of the Provost of the merchants and aldermen of Paris preserved at the Carnavalet Museum, and which we agree today to attribute to Dumée, is a fine example. Our work can be compared to certain tapestries for which Guillaume Dumée designed the cartoons. Thus, the mage in the red cloak has a physiognomy very close to the philosophers of the eponymous tapestry kept at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The fall and the geometric folds of the draperies are similar. The Virgin, in colors and a posture tinged with mannerism, recalls the artist's drawings for the Grand Cabinet du Louvre. It is interesting to compare our work with the Portrait of the Provost of the Merchants and Aldermen of Paris. Dumée encamps the notables there in a chapel – perhaps that of the Hospital of the Holy Spirit adjoining the Hôtel-Dieu – whose central altarpiece features an Adoration of the Magi. The composition evokes Claude Vignon, or even Georges Lallemand (1575 – 1636, Adoration of the Magi, Lille Museum of Fine Arts), but the work of the high altar which, according to Sylvie Béguin, is probably not imaginary, could be identified with precision.
Provenance: Galerie Alexis Bordes Paris
Private collection
Very good state of conservation. Sold with invoice & certificate