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Paintings and drawings from the 17th to the 19th century
Jean-Augustin FRANQUELIN (Paris, 1798 - Paris, 1839)
A young Catalan woman sitting by a garden wall reading a letter.
Circa 1835.
Oil on canvas. H: 73 ; W: 59 cm.
Exhibition: Salon des Artistes Vivants, Paris, 1835, n° 833: "Une jeune catalane, assise près du mur d'un jardin, lit une lettre. Belongs to M. Lecoin".
A burgeoning genre painter, Jean-Augustin Franquelin introduced Catalan costume into his paintings at the 1833 Salon, exhibiting a Catalan peasant woman at a fountain and a Catalan woman praying for her sick son. In this way, he satisfied the public's taste for subjects imbued with picturesqueness and local colour. Local colour" was an expression that came into its own in the early 19th century, encompassing the individual and characteristic features of people and things in a given place and time. In effect, local colour becomes the real image of a world that does not belong to our daily lives, to our knowledge. It's a kind of exotic truth, a way of experiencing the abandonment of familiar customs and places. In this sense, while playing on the craze for regional costume, Franquelin stands out from many of his contemporaries, who were also very much in vogue. For their part, Haudebourt-Lescot, Schnetz, Robert, Bonnefond and Bodinier all chose Italy and Italian costume to compose their genre scenes. The question remains: were these subjects pure fantasy, the artist having chosen a Spanish subject to seduce the public? Or did Franquelin have the opportunity to visit Catalonia? The latter is a plausible hypothesis, but we have no record of the artist ever having visited Barcelona. Whatever the case, Franquelin flooded the Paris Salon with Catalan subjects until 1838, when he died prematurely in 1839. Exhibited in 1835 under the title ‘Une jeune catalane, assise près du mur d'un jardin, lit une lettre’, our painting remains typical of this production. Twenty-five years after it was executed, our work would enjoy the honours of engraving, being lithographed by Louise Marigny and published in the Musée de l'amateur.
