Joseph Vernet

Commissioned by Monsieur Monsieur Jean-Jacques de La Freté ou La Freté (1728-1816), in 1780;

Possibly his sale, Paris, 14 September 1801, part of the lot 63;

Collection Emile Péreire (1800-1875);

By descent until 2004;

With Agnews, London, 2008;

Where acquired by the present owner.

L. Lagrange, Joseph Vernet et la peinture au XVIIIe siècle. Livres de vérité, Commandes, Paris 1864, no. 288, p. 354;

F. Ingersoll-Smouse, Joseph Vernet. Peintre de Marine, Paris 1926, vol. II (1046), p. 32.

Langres, Maison des Lumières Denis Diderot and Musée d'art et d'histoire, Joseph Vernet. Les artistes de Diderot, June-October 2023, no. 14.

Executed by Joseph Vernet for his friend and patron Jean-Jacques de La Freté, this originally perfectly documented work is both an important work by the artist, in which he perfectly masters his artistic language, and a testimony to his friendship with La Freté, to whom he mischievously dedicates the painting...

This work has a very clear dedication on one of the packing cases in the foreground of the composition: ‘A Monsieur de la freté / administrateur général / des Postes’.

This dedication, which certainly gives the name of the individual who commissioned the painting, refers to Jean-Jacques de La Freté (sometimes spelt ‘Lafreté’), who was born in 1728 in Bayonne and died in 1813. A merchant, secretary to the King from 1780 to 1790, tax collector in Lorraine and Barrois in 1781, he was also appointed General Administrator of the Postal Service in 1762. Jean-Jacques de La Freté has sometimes been confused with another – more famous – collector, whose name is almost a homonym: Denis Papillon de la Ferté (1727–1794) was also General Administrator of the Postal Service, though better known for his role as Intendant des Menus Plaisirs de la Maison du Roi (in charge of planning royal events and festivities). This confusion goes back a long way. Lagrange himself, in his monograph – which remains the reference work for Vernet – describes the problem:

‘This Monsieur de La Freté (…), was he one of the tax collectors, or should we understand him to be La Ferté, Intendant des Menus-Plaisirs, whose name has been corrupted by an alliteration in the Italian manner?’ (see Bibliography, Lagrange, p. 197, our translation).

Born in 1728 into a family of shipowners in Bayonne, Jean-Jacques de Lafreté, who was himself a merchant and shipowner, seems to have had the benefit of a considerable fortune. He was close to Benjamin Franklin, and among other ventures he became involved in financing support for the American War of Independence, as did other businessmen in Bayonne and especially Bordeaux. He married Angélique-Michelle-Rosalie Jogues de Martinville (1741–1783), who is depicted in a small pastel portrait by Maurice Quentin de La Tour, now in the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (inv. PM 2773, wrongly described as ‘Mme de Lagreté’). 

Vernet clearly got on well with Jean-Jacques de La Freté, and frequently visited his Paris home, as he himself recalls: ‘There is supper at the house of M. de La Freté every Sunday and every Friday’ (Lagrange, ibidem, our translation). This friendship, with its focus on meals, probably explains the artist’s visual joke: on the case where the dedication appears, masking as customs stamps, he has painted a carafe of wine and two wineglasses, no doubt symbolizing the refreshments they enjoyed together. Incidentally, La Freté commissioned Vernet to produce a decorative ensemble of six paintings, five pieds high, for his salon; for these he paid 5,000 livres each, a price rarely achieved on the market for paintings at that time.

As regards the commission for the present canvas, it is clearly recorded in the artist’s Livre de Vérité, published by Lagrange in 1864, where it is listed as no. 288, p. 354: ‘Un tableau pour M. de la Freté de quatre pieds six pouces de large sur trois pieds de haut’[‘A painting for M. de la Freté four pieds and six pouces wide and three pieds high’]. It is also mentioned in the Journal de Vernet, in April 1780: ‘Un tableau pour M. de la Freté de cinq pieds sur quatre ordonné au mois d’avril 1780’ [‘A painting for M. de la Freté five pieds by four ordered in the month of April 1780’]. Payment was made in three instalments: an initial sum of 1,400 livres was paid on 16 November the same year, followed by 1,200 livres on 29 December and 400 livres on 22 April the following year, making a total of 3,000 livres, once again a considerable sum for a painting at that time.

The painting was perhaps the one sold in September 1801 in Paris, through Jean-Baptiste Lebrun, in an anonymous sale, though Lebrun noted the name of the owner in a copy of the catalogue: ‘Lafrete F.er General’. As Burton Fredericksen and Benjamin Peronnet have pointed out (Répertoire des tableaux vendus en France au XIXe siècle. 1801-1810, 1998, p. 10), some of the painting lots achieved prices sufficiently high to indicate that they contained important works (including, among others, a Rembrandt). The Vernet included in lot 63 reached the large sum of 800 francs, which suggests it could have been the present work. The painting probably then passed into the collection of Emile Péreire (1800–1875) and remained in the same family until it was put up for sale in 2004.

The subject of the work obviously alludes to one of its patron’s principal activities, as a shipowner. In an imaginary port, bathed in a bluish morning light, the viewer is invited to observe the launching of a war frigate, enthusiastically witnessed by a crowd that has thronged to the harbour to watch the spectacle. Painted towards the end of the artist’s career, the work inevitably recalls the series Ports de France, Vernet’s ‘Grand Oeuvre’, painted at the request of Marigny between 1753 and 1765: the present painting is a direct descendant of this series.