350 - Jean Jacques Thérésa DE LUSSE (1758–1833)

Jean Jacques Thérésa DE LUSSE (1758–1833) Bust portrait of a woman wearing a lace bonnet, in an oval frame Pastel with white chalk highlights on paper Signed and dated lower right: De Lusse delineavit (?) 1789 Pinholes, foxing Included is an 18th-century portrait of a man from the same artist’s circle. Expert: Mégane OLLIVIER Monsieur de Lusse, a painter and protégé of the Royal Academies of Paris, having recently arrived in Angers and eager to showcase his talents to art lovers and connoisseurs, as well as to those who wish to have their portraits painted, announces that he paints portraits in both oil and pastel, as well as miniatures, and large-scale landscapes. He also teaches drawing in the city for these various genres.” (Affiches d’Angers, 1776) A student of François-André Vincent, Jean Jacques Thérésa de Lusse pursued a particularly varied career, working in pastel, oil painting, and miniatures. After several stays in the provinces, notably in La Rochelle, Grenoble, Valence, and Saintes, he returned to Paris, where he was described as the “miniaturist of the Palais-Royal.” From 1797 to 1804, he taught drawing in Saintes before being appointed curator of the Angers Museum, where David d’Angers was among his students. Our pastel, dated to the Revolutionary Year, attests to his talent as a portraitist. The subject, depicted in a bust view and slightly in three-quarter profile, is characterized by a delicate and blended execution, particularly evident in the rendering of the face, hair, and fabrics. Description: Trained under François-André Vincent, Jean Jacques Thérésa de Lusse belonged to a generation of portraitists who, in the final decades of the Ancien Régime, established pastel and miniature painting as genres in their own right. His master was close to Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, whom he would marry in 1800 and who was one of the great pastel artists of her time, following in the footsteps of Maurice-Quentin de La Tour and Jean-Baptiste Perronneau. De Lusse’s itinerant career, moving from city to city as commissions took him, mirrors that of many provincial portraitists of the period, while his work as a miniaturist links him to figures such as Jean-Baptiste Isabey and Peter Adolf Hall. His role in Angers—where he counted among his students the young Pierre-Jean David, the future David d’Angers, before the latter joined Jacques-Louis David’s studio in Paris—enshrined his name in the city’s artistic history.