1311 - Henriette-Félicité Tassaert

Henriette-Félicité Tassaert Portrait of a Lady – Sophie Tassaert (?) Portrait of a Gentleman – Nicolas-Thomas Blesson (?) Pastel. 65.5 x 53 cm each. Framed under glass. Provenance Waldemar v. Olshausen. - Acquired in the 1970s on the art market, since then through inheritance in private collection, Rhineland. Literature Cf. G. Leclerc / K. Wernicke: Félicité Henriette Robert, geborene Tassaert (1766-1818) - Berliner Pastellmalerin, Miniaturistin und Stecherin, in: U. Schaper (Hrsg.): Berlin in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Berlin 2009, p. 81-100. The talented pastel artist Henriette Félicité Robert, née Tassaert, was the daughter of the Flemish sculptor Jean-Pierre-Antoine Tassaert (1727–1788) and his wife, the miniaturist Marie-Edmée Moreau (1736–1791), from whom she – alongside Johann Gottfried Schadow – received her early training. Later, she studied under, amongst others, Daniel Chodowiecki and Anton Graff, one of the most important portrait painters of his time. The expressive style, rich detail and the stylistic feature of the illusionistic oval with dark spandrels suggest that the pastels are the work of Henriette Félicité Tassaert. The clothing of the people depicted, in particular the buttons on the gentleman’s jacket, which are decorated with a graphic pattern, reflects the latest French fashion of the late 18th century. The subjects are thought to be the artist’s sister, Sophie Tassaert (1767–1842), and her husband Nicolas-Thomas Blesson (1757–1842), a French chef who had been recommended to the Prussian court. A pair of pastel portraits of these two individuals is recorded in the literature (op. cit. G. Leclerc / K. Wernicke 2009, pp. 93–94). However, the date of 1789 given there seems unlikely: the subjects appear older, and their clothing is more in keeping with the fashion of around 1800. It is therefore possible that the pastels described are the portraits before us, which show the couple in their early thirties and twenties and could thus be plausibly dated. We would like to thank Neil Jeffares for his assistance in cataloguing these pastels.