Carpentras (Vaucluse). Nicknamed the “Van Dyck of France” by an anonymous feather, celebrated for his mastery of the rendering of fabrics by his contemporaries, Joseph Siffred Duplessis (1725-1802) is however relatively unknown to the general public. If his paintings are not absent from large collections, the portrait painter has never benefited from a retrospective. And it is at the Library-Musée the Impuimbertine of Carpentras, in his hometown, that his work is now highlighted. “This exhibition is first of all a great research work to bring together the maximum information on the artist, separate the good grain from the tares because we added to the work of duplessis paintings which are not by his hand”, explains Xavier Salmon, curator at the Louvre and specialist in the 18th century portrait, who assured the exhibition police station. An investigation work which allowed him to identify about two hundred attested works of the artist. Sixty of them are exposed here, offering a rich condensed of his twenty years of a career suddenly interrupted during the Revolution.
Virtuosity in resemblance
Joseph Siffred Duplessis, Madame Hue1781, oil on canvas.
© Speek-Art collection, Belgium
Its artistic production is very classic. Duplessis only paints portraits of members of the nobility, the aristocracy and men of letters, if not some very rare history paintings that he makes during his learning in the workshop of Pierre Subleyras, and which are presented in the course. Portraits which testify, on the other hand, of great virtuosity to make the physical and the characters. The major works of his career are exhibited, like an imposing portrait of Louis XVI in a great royal habit, one of the 54 replicas that the sovereign commanded Duplessis between 1776 and 1790. Some paintings came from the collections of Inguimbertine, which holds the most important public fund of the artist (22 works in total), but the majority were loaned for the occasion. This is the case of his famous portrait of Benjamin Franklin [voir ill.]kept at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which Duplessis immortalizes without artifice during his Parisian stay and whose features are today on all $ 100 tickets. Conversely, some unknown portraits, only mentioned in archive references until then, have been identified and are presented to the public for the first time. Thus of that, particularly successful, of Madame Hue, wife of the landscape painter Jean-François Hue, striking by the velouté of the carnation and the sweetness of the expression.
The scenography, imagined by the Panoramas agency, invites the visitor to progress to the rhythm of the changes in tone of the picture rails, in a course in a straight line. A little airy hanging, constrained by the smallness of the premises. The restricted space also limits the subject, exclusively centered on duplessis while a contextualization on the art of the portrait of court and on the emulation between artists would have been welcome (this all the more since Duplessis was often compared with the Swedish portraitist Alexandre Roslin, also a member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture). The emphasis is however well put on the creative process: three replicas of the same composition, placed side by side, highlight the way in which the workshop works. Regularly led to paint several versions, Duplessis takes care of the execution of the faces, leaving his collaborators to carry out the rest of the table. Likewise, the comparison between a few preparatory drawings and their final portraits highlights any composition changes, often expressly claimed by the sponsor. Thus, the unfinished study of the young runner-up Marie-Antoinette, who conceals nothing of her curved forehead and her rolled up lips, turns into an idealized portrait, with softened features.
