Hippolyte-Jean Flandrin

The background of this study is less green in tone than it appears in the catalogue image. The picture has been relined and a very fine fold running horizontally is visible in the surface of the paper where it has been laid down. There is a small crack on the lower left hand edge. Inspection under UV shows very minor retouches in the background but no further imperfections are apparent. Offered in a carved gilt wood frame.
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This oil sketch relates to the head of the young Saint John in Flandrin's The Calling of Saint John the Evangelist; one of four mural paintings he executed between 1839 and 1841 for the Chapelle de Saint-Jean in the church of Saint-Séverin, Paris.¹ Flandrin received the commission in 1839 and had completed most of the cartoons for the project by the end of that year. He spent most of 1840 painting the murals, which were inaugurated in 1841. The success of the paintings secured his reputation as a mural painter of religious subjects.

The present oil sketch is dated 1842, the year after the Saint-Séverin murals were completed. This would suggest that it is a later version of a slightly larger oil study for the head of the saint in the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris.² The Paris sketch was included in Flandrin's posthumous sale in 1865 as a 'Tête de saint Jean pour la meme decoration [Saint-Séverin]. Année 1840'. Another replica of the subject, of oval format, is in the Musée Ingres, Montauban. Preparatory studies for the entire composition include an oil sketch in the Butkin collection, Cleveland,³ and another formerly in the collection of Andrew Ciechanowiecki; the latter is more finished and may have been intended as an independent work.⁴

1. Reproduced in Hippolyte, Auguste et Paul Flandrin: une fraternité picturale au XIX^e siècle, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée de Luxembourg, & Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 1984, p. 82.
2. Ibid., p. 89, no. 28.
3. See Christian Imagery in French Nineteenth Century Art 1789-1906, exhibition catalogue, New York, Shepherd Gallery, 1980, pp. 228-9, cat. no. 76, reproduced.
4. Ibid., pp. 226-7, cat. no. 75; and Paris & Lyon, ibid., p. 89, no. 27.