Léon Garin After Restout, Philémon And Baucis, Oil On Canvas, 19th Century

Léon GARIN after Jean-Bernard RESTOUT known as Restout the Younger, Philemon and Baucis giving hospitality to Jupiter and Mercury, Oil on canvas, Signed and dated lower left, 1869

We can legitimately assume that Léon Garin painted this canvas in 1869 for the centenary of Restout the Younger's reception as a history painter at the Académie Royale on presentation of his Philemon and Baucis (1769), now kept at the Museum of Fine Arts in Tours.

Winner of the Prix de Rome in 1758, the artist had then illustrated this story, taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses (VIII, 611-724), where the charitable old couple giving hospitality to Jupiter and Mercury are, according to their wish, transformed upon their death into trees mingling their foliage, inseparable in death as in their earthly existence.

Garin's painting is more of a reinterpretation of Restout's painting than a servile copy. Mercury loses his divine attributes (petasus and winged sandals). Jupiter, aged by the addition of a long white beard, is also humanized, far from Restout's ideal model. The fat goose in the original painting is transformed into a much more modest bird, an additional means of mocking mythological episodes, a trend that has been running through painting since Rubens and his Ganymede depicted in the midst of wetting himself.

Visually, the style is also interesting, with these thick paintbrushes  that are articulated by blocks of shadow and light, bordering both on the aesthetic of the painted sketch in the straight line of Fragonard and his "one-hour" paintings, and on that of a quasi-cloisonnism.

There are no conservation issues, the canvas is strong, the pictorial layer in excellent condition.

Height 380 mm
Width 20 mm
Length 460 mm
Weight 864 gr