4 - Henri Nicolas Van Gorp (1756–1819)

Henri Nicolas Van Gorp (1756–1819) 2 Portraits: Woman with a Ruff & Man in a Frock Coat and Spectacles Oil on canvas; one signed lower left, the other signed lower right, depicting a couple of scholars; the woman is shown in a three-quarter view, wearing a large ruffled ruff, holding a half-open book in one hand and a shawl in the other; the man stands with his arms crossed, holding a pair of spectacles 81 x 65 cm Condition report: Craquelure. In Empire-style frames (damaged) Accepted as a student at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in June 1773, Henri-Joseph Van Gorp later became a student or fellow student of Louis-Léopold Boilly. The stylistic similarity between the two artists has long been a source of ambiguity, to the point that art historian Paul Marmottan described Van Gorp as a “Boilly imitator.” The artist exhibited regularly at the Salon from 1796 to 1819. While his early period, up until the beginning of the 19th century, was marked by the production of genre scenes, he subsequently seems to have devoted himself exclusively to portraiture. This double portrait is fully in keeping with the Neoclassical aesthetic championed by masters such as David, Ingres, and Boilly. He adopts its most rigorous conventions, namely a smooth and polished brushwork, an absolute priority given to drawing and line, as well as a striking realism in the rendering of flesh tones and textures.