JACQUES GAMELIN | A prisoner presented to a military leader

Vente anonyme, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, M^es Couturier-de Nicolay, 11 juillet 1984, n°I; 
Acquis à cette vente.

Rennes, 2012, n°65 (notice par Olivier Michel) ;
Sceaux, 2013 (sans catalogue)

Laid down. Overall in good condition. Tiny little light grey fox marks a the lower section of the sheet and some minor areas of abrasion and little losses to the medium. Medium remains strong and overall image is powerful. Sold unframed.
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This grand work, one of a type often referred to as the artist’s chiaroscuro drawings, is executed in Gamelin’s preferred combination of media, namely black ink with a blue-grey wash, heightened with white, on prepared paper. The actual subject of the work remains a mystery.  The narrative unfolds within a large tent where a young, rather distressed woman is being presented to a military leader, who appears to recoil from her with a somewhat dramatic gesture of his body, his arms outstretched to the side.   A stern-faced soldier stands to the right of the composition, while two more stand to the left, their backs against the picture plane.  Various titles have been previously suggested: Esther fainting before Ashasuerus, The Continence of Scipio and The family of Darius before Alexander, but none of these proposals seems convincing, for reasons of setting or storyline.

The narrative depicted here was obviously of interest to Gamelin, as he executed another very similar composition, in the same medium, now in private collection. ¹ That drawing shows the figures in a tent, as in the Adrien sheet, but also includes a backdrop of landscape to the right of the composition.  The assembled line of figures is fairly comparable in the two sheets, but the military leader, seated on his throne, is much more calm and composed than the corresponding figure in the Adrien drawing, and the young female prisoner is also less distraught than her counterpart in the Adrien sheet.

Olivier Michel, in his entry in the Rennes exhibition catalogue, observes that the drawing in a private collection must predate the Adrien composition.  He remarks that Gamelin’s style is drier and more rigid in the earlier version of this subject and that the Adrien drawing demonstrates the artist at his most creative and innovative.

Gamelin was born in Carcassonne in 1738 and spent the early part of his artistic career in Toulouse under the tutelage of Pierre Rivalz, son of the painter Antoine Rivalz (see lot 44).   He later went to Paris where he worked in the studio of Jean Baptiste Deshays de Colleville.  Despite failing to win the Prix de Rome in 1764, he was none the less able to travel to The Eternal City, spending a decade there from 1765 until 1775. This important career enhancement and artistic educational trip was funded by Nicolas-Joseph Marcassus, Baron de Puymaurin, who was a prominent collector and patron in Toulouse.   On his return to France Gamelin was elected a member of the Académie Royale de Peinture, Sculpture et Architecture de Toulouse.  The largest collections of his drawings are in the museums of Carcassonne and Narbonne.

1. Rennes 2012, exhib.cat., op. cit., p. 179, fig. 1