Lot 99: Jean Baptiste Regnault (Paris 1754-1829)

Jean Baptiste Regnault (Paris 1754-1829)
Cupid and Hymen Drink from the Cup of Friendship
signed and dated 'JB. Regnault 1820' (lower left)
oil on canvas
59 x 45 5/8 in. (150 x 116 cm.)

C. Gabet, Dictionnaire des artistes de l'Ecole française au XIXe siécle, Paris, 1831, p. 583.
C. Sells, 'Esquisses de J.B. Regnault', Revue du Louvre, Paris, 1974, p. 410, no. 6. C. Sells, 'J.B. Regnault's Judgment of Paris', Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, 1975, LIII, pp. 120, 125, note 13.
I. Compin and A. Roquebert, Catalogue sommaire illustré des peintures du Musée du Louvre et du Musée d'Orsay, Paris, 1986, IV, p. 171.

J.B. Regnault; (+) sale, Paris, 1-3 March 1830, lot 10.

Signed and dated 1820, this unpublished, newly rediscovered painting depicts a mischievous looking Cupid, God of Love, as he embraces the God of Marriage, Hymen, who prepares to drink from a cup offered by a sculptural figure representing Friendship. Pagan, celebratory and carnal, but thoroughly imbued with references from classical antiquity, Cupid and Hymen Drink from the Cup of Friendship is a masterpiece of Regnault's late career.

A precocious talent who began painting at the age of ten, Regnault was a major figure in first generation of neoclassical History painters who came of age in the decade before the Revolution. However, by the early years of the Restoration, he increasingly withdrew from his position as a leader of the French School and his influence over developments in advanced painting - though not his reputation as an artist - diminished. After 1802 he never again exhibited at the Salon, a choice made possible by the financial independence provided him by a shrewd marriage, successful school and years of state commissions under Napoleon, the profits from which he had prudently invested. The final two and a half decades of Regnault's life were spent almost exclusively devoted to the creation of major paintings in the 'genre gracieux': remarkably independent works conspicuously out-of-step with that of the time, imbued with the eroticism of the eighteenth century but executed with a sexual frankness, sulphurous sensuality and exaggerated - almost Mannerist - elegance of line that was wholly modern. Something of a private indulgence, the paintings of his final years constitute a large and significant body of work not commissioned and perhaps never intended to be sold. Of the eight full-scale and three slightly smaller compositions in the 'genre gracieux' inventoried in his estate sale, the present painting is the only one that appears to depict a subject of the artist's own invention. All of the others to have resurfaced -- The Toilet of Venus (1815; Chrysler Museum, Norfolk), the Judgment of Paris (1812; Detroit Institute of Art), Jupiter and Io (Musee de Brest), and Cupid Asleep in the Arms of Psyche (1828; Art Institute of Chicago) - are explicitly based on tales from Ovid.

The present lot exhibits the slightly perverse, hothouse sensuality that would have made Regnault's late paintings startling to his contemporaries. Although it celebrates the union of Love and Marriage through the intermediary of Friendship (who sits upon an altar covered in ivy, symbolizing fidelity), the painting is notable for its barely concealed homoeroticism. For the two embracing ephebes, Regnault found sources in the classical past, notably in the Ludovisi Castor and Pollux (Prado, Madrid), one of the most celebrated sculptural groups of antiquity, and in prints of Apollo and Pan. But the painting also reflects Regnault's close study of the works of his contemporaries. The graceful, marmoreal forms of Cupid and Hymen owe an obvious debt to the hyper-elegant, flawlessly polished sculptures of Antonio Canova, while the picture's subject matter, smoky atmosphere and nocturnal eroticism represent a slightly sinister recasting of Jean Honoré Fragonard's late masterpiece The Fountain of Love (c. 1785; versions in The Wallace Collection, London, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles and Private Collection, California) and Pierre Paul Prud'hon's Union of Love and Friendship (1793; The Minneapolis Institute of Arts). Indeed, Regnault's Cupid almost perfectly mirrors his counterpart in Prud'hon's famous painting.

Several studies for the painting are known, including an exquisite modello painted on paper mounted on canvas in the Louvre (RF 2159; 33.5 x 27.5 cm.; signed at bottom center 'Regnault'); another painted sketch, with significant variations, in the Museé Bossuet de Meaux (Donation J.P. Changeux; oil on canvas, 32.5 x 27 cm.); and a preparatory drawing (present location unknown) that belonged to Henri Baderou in 1966 (noted in Louvre dossier on Regnault).