This Week in La Gazette Drouot : Jean-Jacques Le Barbier, known as “the Elder” - Modesty, his painting from the 1789 Salon

Barbier the Elder was a painter deeply influenced by literature, and his encounter with the Zurich poet—who was also a painter and engraver—Salomon Gessner was one of the defining experiences of his artistic development. A student of Jean-Baptiste Descamps in Rouen, then of the engraver Jean-Philippe Le Bas, and above all of the painter Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre in Paris, he undertook a self-funded trip to Italy—to which we owe the haunting Pyramid of Sextius in Rome, now in the Angers collection—before traveling to Switzerland on the strength of a commission to illustrate Zurlauben’s Topographical Survey of Switzerland.

There, in 1776, he met Gessner, whose Idylls, Daphnis, and The Death of Abel had brought him fame throughout Europe. In this writer, who combined a sense of nature with the depiction of human emotions, Barbier found a world with which his own work would resonate for years to come. Admitted as an associate of the Royal Academy in 1780 and full member in 1785, he developed over the course of that decade a style of history painting in which moral rigor was nourished by literary sensibility.
 

The astonishment was all the greater because this bowl had been missing for more than twocenturies: having suffered during the Revolution, the Rambouillet porcelain service was already incomplete by 1793, with the “nipple bowls” missing from the Monuments Commission’s inventory, along with all the goblets, saucers, and sugar bowls, as Selma Schwartz, a specialist on the subject, points out (Versalia. Journal of the Society of Friends of Versailles, No.10, 2007, pp.154–181).

A handwritten note,which has likely accompanied this beautiful object since the19th-century, nevertheless sheds light on its subsequent history: a close friend of Empress Joséphine, and sister to the Countess of Bouillé—lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Berry— Marie-Josephe Rose de Carrère (1784–1867), Marquise de Chanaleilles, donated this “bowl from Queen Marie-Antoinette’s dairy” to her grandson, General Ferdinand de Salles (1831–1925).

It is unknown when it subsequently entered the Meyer collection. Alexandre de La Forest Divonne believes that its presence among their selected objects attests to the discerning eye and spirit of preservation that have driven this family of gallery owners for three generations—and, perhaps, to the difficulty antique dealers sometimes face in parting with the pieces they cherish most.