Lot 56: Noël Hallé (Paris 1711-1781)

Noël Hallé (Paris 1711-1781)
La Cage dérobée (or Le Voleur adroit)
signed and indistinctly dated 'Hallé 17..' (centre left)
oil on panel
7¼ x 10 in. (18.4 x 25.3 cm.)

Paris, The Louvre, Salon of 1763, no. 20.

D. Diderot, Salon de 1763, 1763, in J. Adhémar, ed., D. Diderot, Salons, Oxford, I, 1957, p. 207.
[C.-J. Mathon de la Cour], Lettres ... sur les Peintures, les Sculptures et les Gravures exposées dans le Sallon du Louvre en 1763, Paris, I, 1763, pp. 17-8.
É. Béllier de La Chavignerie and L. Auvray, Dictionnaire général des artistes de l'école française, etc., Paris, I, 1882, p. 738.
O. Estournet, 'La famille des Hallé', in Réunion des Sociétés des Beaux-Arts des Départements, Paris, 1905, p. 148, under nos. 103-4.
N. Willk-Brocard, Une dynastie: Les Hallés, Paris, 1995, no. N 84, 'Dimensions et localisation inconnues'.

THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN (LOTS 8, 9, 49 & 56)
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This rediscovered work is doubtless the 'petit tableau' exhibited by the artist at the Salon of 1763, with a pendant Une bergère qui flatte de la main un jeune berger (untraced). Hallé first exhibited the subject with a larger picture ('de 4 pieds' - untraced) at the Salon of 1761, when the composition was recorded by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin in a drawing in his livret. Hallé's reinterpretation of a favourite motif of French Rococo painting achieved great success, and may have been engraved as many as four times (by Vivant Denon, J. Aveline?, Louis-Marin Bonnet and Jean-Auguste Patour). It was doubtless in response to this success that Hallé exhibited the present picture at the very next Salon.