Orange gathering by Gauffier

Discovery of an unknown painting

Louis GAUFFIER (Poitiers 1762 - Florence 1801)

Oranges gathering, family of a diplomat accredited in Italy under the Directory,

Canvas signed and dated (1797-98) lower left: " L. Gauffier / Flor. ce an 6° /de la Rep. e ".
The sketch of this composition is kept in the museum of the Palace of Versailles (MV 4851).

Height. 69, Width. 99 cm.
(old restorations).

Provenance: descendant of Baron Jean-Jacques d'Azemar (1757-1816), General of the Empire placed at the disposal of Eugène de Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy from July 1806 to July 1810; former private collection in Avignon.

Oranges gathering. Canvas signed by Louis Gauffier, located in Florence and dated year 6 of the Republic, 1797-1798, and whose sketch is kept at the Palace of Versailles.

Essay by the Tuquin cabinet

"Outdoor portraits are, perhaps, among the most personal works. Gauffier presents his characters, very often, on a terrace; they lean on a balustrade or, more frequently, on antique fragments, capitals or column bases. They stand out against a backdrop of a distant landscape." This analysis of the painter published by Crozet in 1936 applies perfectly to our unpublished painting (R. Crozet, Louis Gauffier (1762-1801), Bulletin de la société de l'Histoire de l'Art Français, Years 1941-1944, published in 1947, p.100 to 113). On this one, the presence of the orange tree in an earthen pot, placed on an upside down Corinthian capital, brings to this family reunion a picturesque Mediterranean charm, a perfume of "dolce vita", in which the details also participate: the brick apparatus behind the plaster on the left wall, or the watering can. The family atmosphere is reddish; the dress code is French, as can be seen in the shirt dress, probably made of plumetis, with a high waist golden belt worn by the young mother.

Here Louis Gauffier abolished the traditional categories of academic genres: portraits, genre scenes, still life (watering can, tree) are intertwined in a frieze composition characteristic of neoclassical history painting. With the exception of the little girl holding a doll, the female and male figures are grouped together on one side of the canvas (as in David's paintings of this period).

A pupil of Taraval in Paris and winner of the Prix de Rome in 1784 ex-aequo with Jean-Germain Drouais, Gauffier spent the rest of his life in Italy. In 1793, anti-French demonstrations forced the residents of the Académie de France to take refuge in Florence, under the protection of François Cacault. He befriended the cosmopolitan and cultured milieu of the poet Vittorio Alfieri and his wife Louise Stolberg, Duchess of Albany. He frequented artists passing through the Tuscan capital - Gérard, Gros, Garnier -, or those who had settled there, republicans like Boguet, Gagneraux, the Sablet brothers or anti-revolutionary and anglophiles like Fabre. He falls into this second camp. He abandoned religious subjects or subjects of ancient history to devote himself to portraits, staged as English "conversation pieces" (Zoffany) and developed a modern sensitivity to the open air landscape. Most of his models were Russian or English aristocrats of the Grand Tour, French officers, and more rarely Italians. But these characters are often isolated. Family groups are very rare, less ambitious, limited to a small number of characters in a range of dates close to ours: "The Family of André-François Miot, Count of Melito, French Consul in Florence", 1796 (Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, illustration 2), or the "Salucci Family", 1800 (Paris, Musée Marmottan).

One can wonder about the fruits represented and the place. Could they not be mandarins, or even more bitter oranges, as the shape of the leaves suggests. The "Limonaia" (orange grove in French) of the Boboli garden, adjacent to the Pitti Palace, built in 1778/1779, included a very rich collection of citrus trees (still in use today, its current architecture dates from 1816). Note that the conical terracotta vase decorated with a frieze of garlands - and here with a head of Hermes - is typical of Tuscany; it is very porous and allows excess water to pass through. In 1801, Gauffier took up this motif of the orange tree planted in a pot placed high up in the "Portrait en pied d'un officier de la République Cisalpine" (Paris, Musée Marmottan, illustration 3).

Illustrations:

- illustration 1. Louis Gauffier (1762-1801). "Reunion of the family of a diplomat accredited in Italy under the Directory", sketch. Canvas mounted on wood, 11.5 x 15.6 cm. Versailles, Musée national du château.
- illustration 2. Louis Gauffier (1762-1801). "The family of André-François Miot, future Count of Melito, French Consul in Flore.

Reunion of the Sainct-Même family under the Directory
by Aymeric Rouillac

An unpublished discovery, this painting was preserved until spring 2020 in the Var region of France in the descendants of Captain Philippe de Centenier de Fauque (1895-1963), who himself said he had always seen it at his parents' home. It was known only by its modelo, kept at the Château de Versailles and soberly titled "Family reunion of a diplomat accredited in Italy under the Directoire. "Among the ancestors of this collector are a general of the Empire, Baron Jean-Jacques d'Azémar and a captain in Piedmont, Joseph Fauque de Centenier; but they are not the ones represented here due to the lack of descendants in 1797.

The commissioner of this painting is actually Alexandre Marie Gosselin de Sainct-Même (Paris, 1746 - Marseille, 1820). He was fifty-one years old in 1797, twenty-four years older than his wife Anne Henriette Élise Assailly (1770-1859), whom he married in 1784, who was twenty-seven years old on this painting. His portrait, presumably attributed to Rémi-Furcy Descarcin (1747-1793), depicting him a little younger, probably before his marriage, was recently presented at auction with the assistance of the Turquin cabinet (sale in Vannes, Me Ruellan, 19 May 2018, no. 46).

The couple is here surrounded by five of their children. The boy on the right is Alexandre Henry, born in Marseille in 1786, who is then eleven years old. The girl in the blue dress at the back is Anne Joséphine "Laurette", from whom descended Philippe de Fauque, born in Marseille in 1788 and aged nine in 1797. The two girls in white dresses are Antoinette Françoise "Mélanie" (born in Marseille in 1790, aged seven) and Adèle Honorine (born in Marseille in 1793, represented at the age of four). The baby is Charlotte (Caroline) Alexandrine "Élise" (born in Paris in 1795 and aged two years in the painting). The consular dignity of her father is evoked by the purple toga on which she is sitting. Only their last son Eugène Maurice, who was born in Paris in 1800, is missing.

The Duchess of Abrantès draws a faithful portrait of this family in her memoirs: "My mother had found in Paris a family from Marseille to which she was sincerely attached. M. and Madame de Saint-Mesmes were indeed the best, the most excellent friends. M. de Saint-Mesmes was at the head of part of the supplies for the Italian army. He was old enough to be the father of his wife, a young and charming person, who loved him with as much tenderness and even love as if he had been the handsomest boy in Paris. His virtue, his purity, made her really interesting. I feel happy just by recalling her memory. I feel a kind of calm that refreshes my blood, when I remember this young mother surrounded by six or seven children that she had fed, and taking care of her house among them, as a young Greek girl could have done in the past in the bosom of her gynaecium. "(in Laure Junot duchesse d'Abrantès (1784-1838), Mémoires de Madame la duchesse d'Abrantès, or Souvenirs historiques sur Napoléon: la Révolution, le Directoire, le Consulat, l'Empire et la Restauration. Volume 2. 1831-1835, p.97-99)

The young woman collecting the oranges on the left, looking like a vestal virgin, is a close friend of the mother of the family, also referred to by the Duchess of Abrantes as a young woman who later entered the orders as a Benedictine nun and who, in order to show her gratitude to the Lady of Sainct-Memes who had been her Providence, came "to stay for months at her house where she taught the word of God to her children. »

Recent historical studies list some forty diplomats representing France in Italy under the Directory. Most of the personnel stationed on the peninsula, or travellers on the Grand Tour who published at that time, were either young men born in the 1770s and freshly married, or single, if not hardened, at least geographically. Few families of diplomats were present in Italy during this period of war. Although his diplomatic activity is not strictly referenced under the Directory, Alexander of Sainct-Même is said to have been Consul General of France for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. On 16 April 1793, his signature can be found alongside that of Miot on an official document as Administrator of Military Subsistence. It was in this capacity that he was then accredited in Italy, as the Duchess of Abrantes recalls.

Perhaps the fact that Alexander de Saint-Même is separated from his wife and children by a balustrade illustrates the physical separation of the family, which remained in France, while he travelled through Italy? Louis Gauffier is accustomed to the reunion on canvas of different generations physically separated, as shown in his self-portrait with his father in "The Return of the Prodigal Son", which he sent him shortly before his death (Musée de Rochefort). The same is true of his self-portrait in "La famille de l’artiste" posing with his wife, also a painter, and their two children at the foot of a marquee (former Artus collection, Paris).

In 1803, Sainct-Même was one of the three witnesses to Prince Camille Borghese's wedding and presented himself as General Commissioner for Commercial Relations from Naples to Marseille. During the reign of Joachim Napoleon (1806-1808), he was appointed General Director of the Military Subsistence Office of the Kingdom of Naples and the Two Sicilies. Anecdotally, one of the witnesses at the wedding of Pauline, Napoleon Bonaparte's beloved sister, was none other than, once again, Councillor of State Miot, the very man whose family Gauffier represented when he was consul in Florence in 1796 (Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria). The contrast between these two canvases is moreover striking: whereas on ours, happiness, beauty and kindness reign, the family portrait of André-François Miot, future Count of Melito, shows faces that are veiled or servile, with grim smiles under the auspices of the bust of Joseph Bonaparte. Gauffier hardly conceals his aversion to the French Revolution in this other portrait and seems to have happily taken a sympathetic view of this family, also in relation to the Miot family who had preceded him in the painter's studio.

Settled in Florence, Gauffier travelled throughout Italy in the years 1796-1798, notably to Naples where he painted portraits of republican officers. In the same way that he began the portrait of Victor-Léopold Berthier, Major General in front of the Bay of Naples, and finished it and then located it in Florence (former Holland collection, Paris), it is not impossible that the painter began our painting in another town on the peninsula and finished it in his town of residence, where he signed, dated and located it.

Our painting was painted in the year VI, after the Treaty of Campo Formio, which put an end to Bonaparte's first Italian campaign, and shows the orange picking between the autumn of 1797 and the spring of 1798. If the choice of an orange grove provides an aristocratic setting, a symbol of luxury and power that flatters its rich patron, it is above all an evocation of a masterpiece of Italian painting: "The Birth of Spring" by Boticelli. Gauffier in his turn harmoniously depicts eight characters in an orange grove, not in flower but at the moment when the fruit is ripe and must be picked.