Lot 64: MICHEL GARNIER

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION, CONNECTICUT SAINT-CLOUD 1753 - PARIS 1819 YOUNG GIRL LISTENING TO A CONVERSATION BETWEEN TWO LOVERS signed and dated lower left: Mchel. Garnier 1789. oil on canvas 18 1/2 by 15 1/4 in.; 46.7 by 38.5 cm.

Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 15 April 1995, lot 189 (reproduced on the cover); There purchased by the present collector.

Garnier was born in Saint-Cloud and studied with the painter Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre (1713-1789). From 1793 until 1814, he was an exhibitor at the Salon in Paris, mainly of genre subjects in the fashion established by such contemporary painters as Marguerite Gérard and Louis-Léopold Boilly. Garnier also painted portraits and, later, still lifes. As is so expertly demonstrated in the present example, Garnier's elegant, yet highly refined and crisp handling of paint was particularly well suited for the depiction of fashionable and ornately dressed Parisians. The artist's detailed attention to both costume and interior adornments reflect an understanding of the Dutch fijnschilder technique, which enables him to accurately represent the luxuriance of the era's interior spaces. Although the narrative of Garnier's subjects are solidly rooted in the Rococo, the stoic poses of the characters, coupled with their placement within a shallow and more traditionally planar pictorial space hearken back to Neoclassical influences, such as the work of Jacques Louis David. A smaller variant of the present composition, entitled Le Jeu de Cache-Cache, also signed and dated 1789 and in which the lovers in the room beyond are replaced by young children, together with a pendant La Jeune Musicienne, was formerly in the collection of Baronne Cassel van Doorn, Paris, sold at New York, Christie's, 21 October 1997, lot 246.