Jacques-Philippe Joseph de Saint-Quentin

Private collection, France;

with Flavia Ormond Fine Arts Ltd., London, Old Master Drawings 1500-1890, 1999 (as Jean-Baptiste Tierce),

where acquired by Diane A. Nixon

New York, The Morgan Library & Museum; Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings, 2007, no. 62 (entry by Jennifer Tonkovich);

Northampton, Massachusetts, Smith College Museum of Art; Ithaca, New York, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Drawn to Excellence: Renaissance to Romantic Drawings from a Private Collection, 2012-2013, no. 70

Although this atmospheric and finely preserved sheet entered the Nixon collection as the work of Jean-Baptiste Tierce (1757-1790) it can, instead, be securely placed within the small drawn oeuvre of his contemporary, Jacques-Philippe Joseph de Saint-Quentin.¹

Saint-Quentin was a follower of François Boucher and won the Prix de Rome in 1762 for his canvas of the Death of Socrates, now housed in the collection of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris.² Though the corpus of his surviving drawings is extremely small, it is made up of works that are entirely consistent in media and execution. Thanks, in particular to two signed and dated drawings, one in the Louvre³ and the second in a private collection,⁴ a small corpus of some five landscape drawings can now be securely given to him. The Nixon drawing is executed on a vibrant green-blue sheet of paper and similarly to the other surviving drawings by Saint-Quentin is drawn in a combination of black chalk and gray wash, with pronounced, luminous touches of white heightening.

^1.Marianne Roland Michel is largely responsible for reconstructing the artist’s oeuvre; see M. Roland Michel, 'A propos de portraits de famille: Quelques Nouvelles attributions', The Burlington Magazine, vol. 128, July (1986), pp. 549-552

^2.Paris, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, inv. PRP 10

^3.Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. RF 41256

^4.Paris, Galerie Cailleux, Artistes en voyage au XVIIIe siècle, 1986 no. 59, reproduced