(Paris 1726–1806 Saint Petersburg)
A Bacchanal by a Herm,
oil on canvas, 244 x 275 cm, unframed

Provenance:
Claude-Henri Watelet (1718–1786), Paris;
sale of his estate, Paris, 12 June 1786, lot 24 (as ‘un sujet de Bacchanale… 7 pieds 8 pouces sur 8 pieds’);
Private collection, Belgium

Exhibited:
Paris, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Salon of 1759, no. 120

Literature:
M. Sandoz, Gabriel François Doyen 1726–1806, Paris 1971, p. 32,
cat. no. 15

The present monumental canvas, with its intertwined nude forms, abundance of exotic fruit and dramatic forested setting is arguably the chef d’oeuvre of the French 18th century academic painter Gabriel François Doyen. The work shows a Bacchanal and was executed in 1758–59 for the Académie de peinture et de sculpture in Paris. The standing sculptural Herm which divides the composition, is typical of the antiquities French painters studied as part of their training. Herms symbolised Aphrodite’s winged messenger, and were placed by roadsides in Ancient Greece, with the statue’s phallus (although concealed by other figures in the present work) meant to confer good fortune on travellers. The iconography of the nymph and the centaur in the present picture crowing the Herm with a flower wreath is unclear but adds to the general ambience of a sensual and divine celebration.

The picture has a distinguished provenance, once residing in the collection of the artist and royal treasury official – Claude Henri Watelet (1718–1786), whose portrayal by Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805) is conserved in the Louvre, Paris. It remained in Watelet’s collection until 1786 and its purchase by a so discerning collector certainly evidences of the work’s quality and of the tremendous graphic impact it must have had when first exhibited at the Parisian Salon. Doyen’s preparatory drawing for the present work is also conserved in the Louvre, Paris (inv. no. 26239).

Doyen trained under Charles Andre van Loo, grandson of the great Dutch Golden Age master Jacob van Loo, who originally came from Northern Flanders. After completing his training Doyen made a seminal visit to Antwerp to study the monumental canvases of Peter Paul Rubens, and the Baroque master’s artistic themes, with their exuberant handling, fleshy, intertwined figures and the influence of antique statuary are all vividly apparent in the present Bacchanal. Indeed, Doyen’s brilliance in capturing writhing bodies has been suggested by scholars as an inspiration for artists of the succeeding generation, such as Theodore Gericault in his celebrated The Raft of the Medusa. Fleeing the turmoil of the French Revolution, Doyen was invited by Catherine the Great to join the artistic circle clustered around her Imperial court in Saint Petersburg. Appointed director of the Russian Academy of Fine Arts by Catherine’s successor, Tsar Paul I, Doyen was involved in the decoration of the Winter Palace, with many of his works still conserved in the Hermitage State Collections, Saint Petersburg.