Jacques Albert Sénave

The actual painting is less red in tone than the catalogue illustration suggests. The canvas is unlined, but retains much of its bounce. Stretcher marks are slightly visible to the front. There's a fine and dense craquelure throughout, which is beginning to lift in some areas and which has resulted in a tiny fleck of paint loss lower centre. The paint surface is well preserved and is under a very dirty layer of varnish. Under UV light very few tiny retouchings can be made out in the chair and along the lower and right edges, but no further significant retouchings are revealed. Offered in a gilt wood frame with decorative moldings in good condition. (MW)
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Hitherto unrecorded and unpublished, this portrait is a rare addition to Sénave's oeuvre, which primarily consists of Paris cityscapes, history and genre paintings, and very few portraits. Unlike this painting, his genre paintings were strongly oriented towards 17th Century Dutch and Flemish genre scenes, and were especially reminiscent of David Teniers' tavern and festival scenes.

Sénave began his training with a canon at the abbey of his native town of Loo, and attended the painting academies in both Dunkirk and Saint Omer. In 1780 he came to Paris, where he studied under Joseph Benoît Suvée (1743-1807) and Jacques Louis David (1748-1825), who was considered to be the pre-eminent painter of the era. After presenting a painting of Rembrandt's studio depicting known figures from the Master's time, Sénave was appointed Honorary Dean of the Painting Academy of Ypres in 1821.

The sitter of this distinctive portrait is unidentified, but the book to which the viewer is drawn by his pointed finger, does tell us something about the sitter's beliefs: in this well-known didactic poem, Alteaergeheimnissen of 1645, the Catholic convert Joost van den Vondel expounded the doctrine of the Eucharist.