Louis Roland Trinquesse

Consuelo Vanderbilt Earl (1903-2011), Ridgefield, Connecticut;

with W.M. Brady & Co., Inc., New York, Old Master and 19th-Century Drawings and Oil Sketches, 2014, no. 19,

where acquired by Diane A. Nixon

Although little is known of Trinquesse’s birth and death, he may have come from Burgundy and is known to have won medals at the school of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1770. His surviving oeuvre includes works variously dated from 1763 to 1797,¹ however it is his lively red chalk drawings, of which this is a particularly fine example, for which he is chiefly remembered.

The inscription on the Nixon drawing is particularly illuminating. It was not uncommon for Trinquesse to date his drawings, but here, unusually, he has also taken the liberty of including the sitter's name – Madame Franmery. Marianne Franmery was one of Trinquesse’s favorite models and Jean Cailleux has assembled a group of over twenty drawings of this stylish and pretty young woman, drawn by Trinquesse in the 1770s.² Another fine example of this type of drawing, depicting Franmery seated and reading, was sold at Sotheby’s in 2020 from the collection of Ambassador and Mrs. Felix Rohatyn.³

^1.See P. Stein, Eighteenth-Century French Drawings in New York Collections, exhib. cat., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999, pp. 220-221, under no. 95

^2.J. Cailleux, 'The Drawings of Louis Roland Trinquesse', in The Burlington Magazine, CXVI, February 1974, pp. ii-xi

^3.Sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 14 October 2020, lot 2