(Paris 1739–1821)
A sleeping bacchante,
oil on panel, 22.5 x 29.5 cm, framed

We are grateful to Joseph Assémat-Tessandier for confirming the attribution of the present painting on the basis of a photograph.

Jean-Jacques, a pupil of his elder brother Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée (1725–1805), won the Prix de Rome in 1760 and stayed at the Académie de France in Rome between 1763 and 1768. In 1769, having settled in Paris, he was approved (agrée) by the Académie Royale and was accepted as a full member six years later in 1775, becoming adjoint à professeur in 1776 and professeur in 1781.

Jean-Jacques painted historical subjects and ceiling paintings for the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre and at the Petit Trianon in Versailles. When he exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1781, he was described as ‘M. De La Grenée le jeune, Professeur’. Jean-Jacques also received numerous commissions for religious works, including the cycle of paintings for the Royal Chapel at Fontainebleau. He later experimented with painting on glass and porcelain and he was the artistic director of the Sèvres porcelain factory between 1785 and 1800, creating numerous designs, notably the Etruscan service for Marie-Antoinette’s dairy at Rambouillet.

Lagrenée’s easel pictures are almost exclusively history paintings and, like his elder brother and Jean-Marie Vien, he was particularly attracted to subjects from ancient history. His style conforms to the French Neoclassical aesthetic of the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

The present painting of a reclining nude still has the power to startle, in part because of the slightly voyeuristic composition and in this regard, the present painting appears more Rococo in subject matter than Neoclassical. The meticulous attention paid to the shimmering brushwork in the depiction of drapery is reminiscent of Fragonard’s ‘Dutch’ interiors from the 1780s, and can be compared to Sextus Tarquinus admiring the virtue of Lucretia, sold Sotheby’s, New York, 24 January 2008, lot 93.

Works by Lagrenée are in the collections of the Louvre, Paris, the Kunstbibliothek, Berlin, the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and elsewhere.