Lot 128: Michel Garnier (Saint-Cloud 1753-1819 Paris)

An Artist's studio oil on canvas 23 1/8 x 283/4 in. (58.7 x 73.1 cm.) NOTES Born near Paris in Saint-Cloud, the hometown of his patron the Duke of Chartres, Michel Garnier worked in the studio of the history painter Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre. He overcame the many difficulties of Parisian artistic life at the end of the eighteenth century and became a successful painter of popular genre scenes. Although he occasionally exhibited at the Salons of the Louvre from 1793 to 1814, Garnier's life and career are largely unknown to us today. Although also a portraitist, and occasionally a painter of still lifes, Michel Garnier was part of a generation of painters who dedicated themselves to genre scenes and gallant subjects, which became fashionable under the ancien r‚gime and were widely disseminated as prints. The present painting represents an artist's studio and evokes the splendor of Parisian interiors at the end of the eighteenth century. The background--painted like a still life replete with fabrics, pottery, plaster casts and jars of linseed oil--is presided over by a statue of the Apollo Belvedere. Garnier, who was devoted to music, focuses the foreground on a woman playing a guitar, as he does in other compositions. The placement of figures and concern with detail recalls the compositions of Marguerite G‚rard and Louis-L‚opold Boilly. Two similar versions of the painting--now attributed to Garnier but formerly given to G‚rard--are known to us today: one is in the Mus‚e des Arts et de l'industrie, Saint-Etienne, and a probable copy is at Versailles.