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X. Pierre Louis Dubus de Préville

Entered October 2017; revised August 2019

Cambridge, Harvard University, Fogg Museum, inv. 1939.107.

Oil on canvas

Diameter 20.3 cm

 

ALTERNATIVE TITLES

Commedia dell’Arte Actor

Head of an Actor, Preville(?) of the Comédie française

 

PROVENANCE

New York, collection of Grenville L. Winthrop (1846-1943; lawyer); donated to the Fogg Museum in 1939.

  

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bowron, European Paintings (1990), cat. 227.

         
REMARKS

Although classified as “in the style of Jean-Antoine Watteau,” the painting has little to do with the manner of Watteau or his followers. All that it shares with that artist is the subject matter, namely the world of the comedic theater.

 

 

Joseph Baillio has kindly pointed out that the so-called Watteau portrait is actually a reduction of the head and torso of Vigée-Lebrun's Portrait of the comedian Pierre Louis Dubus de Préville (1721-1799).

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