Jean-Joseph Weerts

Private collection, UK;

Anonymous sale, London, Bonhams, 22 September 2021, lot 57.

Paris, Palais des Champs-Élysées, Salon, 1890, no. 2423.

Salon de 1890, exh. cat., Paris 1890, p. 42, no. 2423 (as Portrait de M. J. Hugues);

F. Javel, 'Salon de 1890' in L'Art français: revue illustrée hebdomadaire, issue 18218, October 1890, p. 21, reproduced;

D. Lobstein, Défense et illustration de l'impressionisme: Ernest Hoschedé et son 'Brelan de salons' 1890, Dijon 2008, p. 47.

Praised by the critics at the Salon in 1890, Weerts’s portrait of Dominique Jean-Baptiste Hugues (1849–1930) shows the sculptor at ease in his studio, leaning against his marble sculpture Oedipus at Colonus. A pupil of Dumont and Bonassieux, Hugues first exhibited his sculptural work at the Salon in Paris in 1878 and went on to win numerous national awards. Hugues’s grand sculpture of Oedipus, shown in the final days of his life as related by the tragedian Sophocles in his final Theban play entitled Oedipus at Colonus, was completed in 1885, and was later exhibited at the Musées nationaux in 1888, the Musée du Luxembourg in 1890 and the Musée du Louvre in 1931. Today, it can be found at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris (inv. no. RF 842, LUX 128).  

As for the other sculptures featured in the painting, in the foreground to the left of the artist is a bronze bust of a woman, which can be identified with a work Hugues realised in 1879, during his stay at Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome (unknown location). In the left background is Hugues’s plaster cast of Bailly Taking the Oath of the Jeu de Paume, executed in 1788 and now lost. In anticipation of the centenary of the French Revolution, many artists took up the subject of Jean-Sylvain Bailly (1736–1793), the first mayor of Paris, whom Hugues showed together with two compatriots, evoking the ire of some critics, who felt he had degraded the heroic, historic figure by creating “un trio de l’opéra-comique.”  

The present portrait was made in response to a bronze bust Hugues had made of Weerts, exhibited at the Salon in 1884 (current whereabouts unknown). Executed in warm and subtle tones of brown and cream, the painting gives a vivid impression of the array of objects in the busy studio. Hugues is surrounded by sculpted figures at different scales, drawing the viewer’s eye around the composition.