A half-length portrait of a boy in a high collar and a black overcoat.
 

 
LOUISE-MARIE-JEANNE MAUDUIT, later HERSENT

(Paris 1784 – 1862)


Portrait of a Young Boy

Signed and dated, lower left: Louise Hersent/ 1823


Oil on canvas
22 ½ x 19 inches (57.2 x 48.3. cm)

Provenance:

Private Collection, Chicago, by 1996

Private Collection, Florida

This charming portrait of a young boy is the work of Louise-Marie-Jeanne Hersent, a little-known woman artist of the French Restoration often identified by her maiden name, Mauduit. While Hersent—as we will call her here following the signature on the painting—has been understudied, the known details of her life and career reveal that she held a privileged position in artistic life in the early nineteenth century in Paris. She exhibited at the Salon from 1810 until 1824, and in 1821 she married the painter Louis Hersent, a successful pupil of Jacques-Louis David who was patronized by Louis XVIII and Charles X. It is likely through her husband’s royal patronage that Hersent’s Louis XIV Visits Peter the Great was purchased for the Royal Collection in Versailles.[i]  

In 1806, while still Louise Mauduit, she painted a portrait of Napoleon’s youngest sister, Pauline Bonaparte, soon after her marriage to Prince Camillo Borghese (Fig. 1). The portrait is nearly contemporary with Canova’s famous marble of her naked, Paolina Borghese as Venus Victrix (Villa Borghese, Rome), dated 1805–1808.  The high status of her subject indicates that the artist was well-connected in her own right before her marriage, but little is known about her initial artistic training.

 
Well-fed woman in a white empire dress is seated on a high-armed settee on which she is resting her left elbow. Green fabric is draped over the arm and spills into her lap.

Fig. 1. Louise-Marie-Jeanne Mauduit, later Hersent, Portrait of Pauline Bonaparte, oil on canvas, 71.9 x 52.5 cm, The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, UK.

 

It has been assumed that Hersent was a student of Charles Meynier, as well as her husband. However, it has gone unnoticed that an album assembled by Constance-Marie Charpentier with sketches by her pupils includes a drawing by the artist inscribed “Julie Constance [the daughter of Charpentier] en 1810 en 1811” and “par Mlle Mauduit” (Fig. 2).[ii] Although she has fallen into relative obscurity, Charpentier had the distinction of being one of the only female students of Jacques Louis-David, whose workshop she entered in 1787 at twenty years old. She was a specialist in portraiture and later in life, following the death of her husband, she supported herself primarily by training female students in her home on the rue du Pot de fer Saint-Sulpice (today the rue Bonaparte). This undoubtedly had an influence on Louise, who similarly specialized in portraiture and ran a studio to instruct women artists, among whom were the porcelain painter Marie Virginie Boquet and the portraitist Louise Adélaïde Desnos. The artist’s appearance is recorded in a drawing by François Joseph Heim—executed as a sketch for his group portrait of artists receiving awards from Charles X for their Salon entries in 1824—as well as in a portrait by her student, Louise Adélaïde Desnos (Figs. 3-4).

 
Full length drawing of a girl in profile, seated on an empire side chair.

Fig. 2. Louise-Marie-Jeanne Mauduit, later Hersent, Sketch of Julie Constance Charpentier, black chalk on paper, 28 x 21 cm, Private Collection, France.

 
 
Figure of a woman in a turn-of-the-century dress and hat. She holds a white handkerchief.

Fig. 3. François Joseph Heim, Sketch of Louise-Marie-Jeanne Hersent, pencil and charcoal with weight heightening on paper, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Female figure dressed in black poses next to a stand with a painting palette and brushes.

Fig. 4. Louise-Adélaïde Desnos, Portrait of Louise-Marie-Jeanne Hersent, oil on canvas, 103 x 101 cm, Château de Versailles, France.

Prominently signed and dated 1823, our portrait was painted by Hersent within the first few years of her marriage. The boy is elegantly dressed in a dark blue coat and a bright white shirt with a gold pin placed in his white jabot. With the boy’s body positioned in three-quarter view and his face appearing fully frontally, this bust-length portrait is straightforward in presentation, yet the artist has added interest and emphasized the subject’s youth through the inclusion of the few small strands of hair that fall on his forehead and in the depiction of the collar with one side turned upward. A similar portrait of a boy is in the collection of the Bowes Museum (Fig. 5). Dated 1815, this portrait provides another example of Hersent’s ability to create sensitive images of youth, and also serves as a useful point of comparison, as it reveals the artist’s maturation over the course of eight years to the mature style exhibited in our painting. A Portrait of a Young Woman in a White Dress with a Cashmere Shawl dated 1828 (Fig. 6) shows further development to a more Romantic treatment of both figure and costume.[iii]

 Our canvas is stamped on the reverse with the mark of the noted artist supplier Belot, located at 3 rue de L’Arbre Sec in Paris.

 
Young male sitter in high collared dress shirt and a black overcoat.

Fig. 5. Louise-Marie-Jeanne Mauduit, later Hersent, Portrait of a Boy in Green, oil on canvas, 64.4 x 53.7 cm, The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, UK.

Female figure resting bent arms on the back of a fainting couch.

Fig. 6. Louise-Marie-Jeanne Mauduit, later Hersent, Portrait of a Young Woman in a White Dress with a Cashmere Shawl, oil on canvas, 92 x 73.5 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia.

 

[i] http://collections.chateauversailles.fr/#d65b2212-ce6b-4207-8e92-cdf417624c45.

[ii] For information on Constance-Marie Charpentier, see the studies by Gildas Dacre-Wright: http://www.constance-charpentier.fr/; and https://lespetitsmaitres.com/2014/10/constance-charpentier-1767-1849/. For the drawing by Hersent, see: https://arcade.nyarc.org:443/record=b1038221~S6.

[iii] Exhibited Peintres Femmes: Naissance d’un Combat, 1780–1830, Paris, Musée du Luxembourg, 2021, exh. cat., ed. Martine Lacas, p. 200, ill. 31.