Retrato de Mulher como Pomona, Tradicionalmente Identificada como a Marquesa de Parabère (Portrait of a Lady as Pomona, Traditionally Identified as the Marquise de Parabère) - Nicolas de Largillière

 

Retrato de Mulher como Pomona, Tradicionalmente Identificada como a Marquesa de Parabère (Portrait of a Lady as Pomona, Traditionally Identified as the Marquise de Parabère) - Nicolas de Largillière
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OST - 147x104 - 1714


This beautiful and enchanting painting of a woman as the goddess Pomona by Nicolas de Largillière, one of the most important and sought-after portraitists in Paris during the Regency period and beyond, was recently restituted to the heirs of the renowned Jewish collector Jules Strauss after being held in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden since 1959. The portrait is a tour-de-force by the artist that exhibits his unmatched ability to capture important members of Parisian society with elegance and beauty within a complex and creative compositional style that reflects both his French and Flemish tendencies.
Though born in Paris, Nicolas de Largillière was raised and trained in Antwerp before moving to London to work under Sir Peter Lely. These Flemish roots stayed with him throughout his career, seen in his warm, rusty color palettes and Van Dyckian attention to grand, curving drapery and atmospheric backgrounds within his portraits. Largillière moved back to Paris in 1682 and four years later gained entry into the Académie Royale, of which he would eventually become Director. Unlike some painters in his circle, Largillière preferred to work with private patrons, rather than on official court portraiture, and thus quickly established his reputation as the preeminent portraitist to the wealthy Parisian bourgeoisie.
Largillière often portrayed his clients as allegorical figures and developed a repertory from which his patrons could select their guise. In the present painting, the sitter is portrayed as Pomona, a rarer choice but certainly an intriguing one. The goddess of fruit and abundance in Roman mythology, Pomona, famed for her skills in garden cultivation, was often depicted amongst fruit and fruit trees, within gardens or orchards. Here Largillière has painted his sitter holding a ripe pomegranate on her lap, torn open in a suggestive and seductive manner, while resting her right hand on a larger pumpkin on a table beside her, with autumnal trees bearing grapes in the background.
In Ovid's Metamorphoses, the beautiful and sought-after Pomona shuns amorous love and remains in her enclosed orchard, rejecting the advances of satyrs, Pan, Silvanus, and Priapus. The god of the seasons Vertumnus, however, tricks the goddess by wearing the disguise of an old woman looking to pick apples in order to enter her orchard. After telling her tales of the danger of rejecting a suitor, Vertumnus eventually reveals himself and successfully woos the goddess. In the present portrait, Largillière includes Vertumnus just behind Pomona's right shoulder, looking up at Cupid, who has removed Vertumnus's mask and looks down, holding his finger to his mouth as if assuring him that he won't reveal his secret. Pomona, however, is powerfully and confidently looking directly at the viewer, unaware of or uninterested in what is going on behind her.
The sitter has traditionally been identified as Marie Madeleine de La Vieuville, the marquise de Parabère (1693-1755), who was the mistress of Philippe II, duc d'Orléans while he was regent of France during the childhood reign of King Louis XV of France. Indeed, the catalogue for the exhibition at the Petit-Palais in 1928 describes the figure of Vertumnus as a portrait of the duc himself.
This painting dates from 1710-1714, when Largillière was at the height of his powers and popularity. The painting can be compared to another masterpiece painted by the artist around the same time, the Portrait of the Comtesse de Montsereau as Diana, with her sister, formerly in the New-York Historical Society and sold New York, Sotheby's, 12 January 1995, lot 89. Another, smaller portrait of a woman as Pomona by Largillière, in which Vertumnus is portrayed fully in his disguise as the old woman, is now in the Legion of Honor, San Francisco.
The renowned art collector and banker Jules Strauss (1861-1943) was born in Frankfurt and spent his entire adult life in France. By 1884, following his arrival in Paris in 1880, Strauss was already collecting Dutch and Flemish Masters and particularly eighteenth-century French painting. He had a strong appreciation for Watteau and owned several paintings by the master and his followers. His interest also extended to antiquities, old master drawings, furniture, sculpture, tapestries, porcelain, books and nineteenth-century painting. By the early 1890s, he had already begun to collect the Impressionists and owned more than 150 paintings over the years, including fine works by Manet, Cézanne, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Gauguin. In a lifetime of passionate collecting, Jules Strauss put together one of the very first remarkable collections that encompassed the finest examples of the arts from antiquity to the Impressionists.
Strauss was a connoisseur, an amateur and an insatiable collector – Pauline Baer describes "le gout Strauss" as shorthand for his extraordinary eye in her book The Vanished Collection. Many works from his extensive collection of Impressionist paintings were sold at auctions in Paris in 1902 and 1932 and several can be found in principal museum collections worldwide. Strauss was already elderly in May 1940 at the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Paris. He and his family were subjected to Nazi persecution due to their Jewish origin.
Recently, his heirs have worked extensively to research and identify works of art from the Jules Strauss collection, which were either stolen, confiscated or forcibly sold to the Nazis during the Occupation of France, including the present painting which since 1959 and until early 2021 remained in the collection of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden. The heirs of Jules Strauss and the museum were able to reconstruct the provenance and whereabouts of the painting from when it left the possession of Jules Strauss in Paris in 1941 to its arrival in Dresden in 1959. During the Nazi occupation of France, Strauss remained with his wife Marie-Louise in Paris. The painting was purchased in 1941 by the German Reichsbank in Berlin through Margot Jansson, then discovered in a safe of the German Democratic Republic’s Ministry of Finance, then subsequently transferred to the National Gallery in Berlin in 1953, and finally to the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden in 1959. In 2021, the museum restituted the painting to the heirs of Jules Strauss, according to the Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art of 1998 and the Declaration of the German Federal Government on the Locating and Restitution of Cultural Property Seized as a Result of Nazi Persecution, especially from Jewish Property of December 1999, and with the help of with the help of the French Embassy in Berlin and the French Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation.