Allegory of Seduction - Jeanne-Philiberte Ledoux (1767-1840)

JEANNE-PHILIBERTE LEDOUX (PARIS 1767-1840 BELLEVILLE)
"Allegory of Seduction"
Oil on canvas
Canvas cm. 65 x 50 frame 80 x 65
Excellent condition
First canvas and contemporary frame.

Splendid female portrait executed with great finesse by the famous Parisian painter JEANNE-PHILIBERTE LEDOUX, who offers a sample of his skill in depicting young and beautiful ladies.
The protagonist, even with her gaze turned downwards and her hand almost covering her face in a gesture of modest shame, mischievously shows a bare breast and her pose is attractive and of great charm.
The Author shows off all his skills in female portraiture by impersonating "The Seduction" in a particularly graceful way where a refined elegance shines through rather than a more sensual eroticism, with the female in ostentatious provocative attitudes.
We underline the excellent condition of the canvas complete with its beautiful original frame, gilded and finely carved with a neoclassical motif.

Biography
Ledoux, Jeanne Philiberte (1767–1840)
French painter. Born Paris, 1767; died 1840.

What is known about the French painter Jeanne Philiberte Ledoux comes from salon records, which document that she was one of several students of Jean Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805) and that she exhibited at salons between 1793 and 1819, after which she disappeared from public records. The titles of two paintings exhibited at the 1819 Salon, Little Girl Holding a Dove and Boy Near an Apple with a Fistful of Sticks, are indicative of Ledoux's preoccupation with children, as is Portrait of a Boy (Louvre, Paris), a work that exudes the sentiment and idealism found in much of Greuze's work. In another work, Portrait of a Boy (The Baltimore Museum of Art), painted around 1800, the artist used a more direct technique, making the portrait more intimate than the earlier portrait in the Louvre.

Having never exhibited large historical paintings or portraits of famous people, Ledoux had a modest career as a portraitist, catering only to bourgeois clients. Although her paintings appear in many French and American museums, most of her works remain with the descendants of her original patrons, complicating efforts to identify and study her work. Furthermore, her canvases are rarely signed or dated, and so some may have been mistakenly attributed to her better-known teacher Jean Baptiste Greuze.