Laurent Pécheux

Given by Laurent Pêcheux to his son, together with the three other works from the serie of the Four Elements, Paris;

Anonymous sale, Perrin-Royere-Lajeunesse, Versailles, 26 March 2006, lot 55;

Art market, Ulzio (Turin), 2006;

Art market, Turin.

M. Paroletti, Turin et ses curiosités, Turin 1819, p. 55;

L. C. Bollea, Lorenzo Pecheux, maestro di pittura nella R. Accademia delle belle arti di Torino, Turin 1936, pp. 337-338, 402 (appendix 4, no. 136), 404 (appendix 5, no. 28);

A. Baudi di Vesme, Schede Vesme. L'arte in Piemonte dal XVI al XVIII secolo, Turin 1968, vol.III, p. 799, no. 133;

S. Pinto, Arte di Corte a Torino da Carlo Emanuele III a Carlo Felice, Turin 1987, p. 104;

La Gazette de l'Hôtel Drouot, 11-17 March 2006, p. 153.

Dôle and Chambéry, Laurent Pécheux. Un peintre français dans l'Italie des Lumières, 2012-13, no. 71.

The Triumph of Amphitrite and Neptune is a monumental painting from a series of four allegories of the elements painted by Laurent Pécheux. It was executed by the artist when he was in his seventies and at the peak of his career and his art.

Born in Lyon in 1729, Laurent Pécheux spent most of his life in Italy, principally Turin. Sent to Rome in 1753, he became acquainted with two major figures in Roman painting of the period, Anton Raphaël Mengs and Pompeo Batoni. He was accepted into the Accademia di San Luca in 1762. He soon started receiving prestigious religious commissions, for instance for the church of S. Caterina da Siena, as well as lay commissions such as those for the Palazzo Borghese, the Palazzo Barberini and the Villa Borghese. His reputation grew and he was summoned to Parma to paint the portrait of Maria Luisa, the future Queen of Spain. In 1777, he became chief painter to Victor Amadeus III, King of Sardinia-Piedmont, as well as Director of the Accademia of Turin.

At the time he was working on this painting, Pécheux was highly regarded and well established. It might be thought that these four allegories were intended to replace those by Francesco Albani (1578-1660), painted between 1625 and 1628 for Cardinal Maurice of Savoy, now in the Galleria Sabauda (inv. 489, 495, 500 and 509; diam.1.80), which were stolen by Napoleon and in the Louvre until 1814. However, Laurent Pécheux wrote that he had sent these paintings to his son in Paris, who had become a corresponding member of the Institut there in 1807, which seems to rule out this hypothesis. 

Dated 1808, the present painting is the last allegory of the series which he began in 1803. In his catalogue, Pécheux describes it as follows: ‘The other one, representing water, is the Triumph of Amphitrite and Neptune accompanied by nereids, tritons and cupids playing with dolphins’ (Pécheux, ‘Note des tableaux que j’ay fait à Rome’ cited by Bollea, 1936, p. 402, our translation). As Sylvain Laveissière underlines in his note on the painting in the catalogue of the exhibition devoted to the artist in 2012 and 2013, Pécheux is following in a long tradition of representations of marine triumphs, beginning with the classically sculptural models by Raphael at the Villa Farnesina, revisited by Poussin notably in the Birth of Venus, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (E1932-1-1), and found also in the work of Albani and many others.

However, Pécheux appears here to have chosen to emphasize the theme’s grandeur: he includes twenty-three figures in the painting, with a multiplicity of motifs to add a monumental aspect to the work.

Laveissière also draws attention to Pécheux’s modern qualities: he paints with a visible brushstroke, unlike in his earlier paintings, displaying a ‘primitivism that chimes with the latest trends in European painting’.

Finally, it is impossible not to be touched and amused by this artist in the evening of his life, perhaps bored with a less than stimulating life as a court painter, taking on a new challenge and embarking for his own pleasure on a series of paintings that are demanding for their size as well as their subject matter. This last work is also a testament to the spark of energy that fuelled the whole career of this passionate artist.