Jean-simon Fournier (late 18th Century) The Bouquet Offered And The Bouquet Accepted

Jean-Simon FOURNIER
(active in Paris in the 1790s)
The Bouquet Offered and The Bouquet Accepted
Oil on canvas
H. 41.5 cm; L. 33 cm each
Signed Fournier and dated lower left - December 1794

Provenance:
- Bonham's sale, London, December 16, 1998, lot 77
- Sotheby's New York sale, Important Old Master Paintings, January 27, 2000, lot 149 (in pair $35,000 excluding premium)
- English private collection

Jean-Simon Fournier is one of the main representatives of galante genre painting in France, from the end of the reign of Louis XVI until the beginning of the 1st Empire, but especially during the Revolution, alongside Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761-1845), Henri-Nicolas van Gorp (1758-1820), Marguerite Gérard (1761-1837), Jean-Frédéric Schall (1752-1825) and Michel Garnier (1753-1829). But despite his fairly active participation in the Salon between 1791 and 1799, we have very little biographical information. While he probably belonged to a family of typographers and printers, we do not find his first name in the family tree of the Fournier des Ormes dynasty, nor in the works devoted to them. Several sources describe him as a native of Paris, a pupil of Jean-Baptiste Regnault, and living on rue des Deux-Boules in the 1790s. Parliamentary archives indicate that in 1791 he received wages (1,200 livres) as an artist attached to the King's buildings, while his master Regnault received 12,000 livres. At the Salons of 1791 and 1793, he exhibited only portraits; in 1798, a new series of portraits: these are probably, at least for 1798, drawings, small circular profiles, engraved by Chrétien, the inventor of the physionotrace. Fournier had been in the service of Chrétien as a draftsman until 1798, perhaps as early as 1791 (he thus succeeded Quenedey and Jean Fouquet), this having probably been facilitated by his family's activity in the engraving world. The Metropolitan of New York preserves two drawings of this type by Fournier. With opportunism, Fournier took advantage of the revival of the genre scene treated in the Dutch style, but in interiors and atmospheres relevant to the French taste of the time, with a very precise technique and a smooth look to represent the satin fabrics, the furniture and the accessories. He exhibited six different compositions at the Salon between 1795 and 1799, sometimes two or three times; Some were engraved by artists such as Cazenave or Chaponnier, who also reproduced the works of Boilly, Marguerite Gérard or Schall. The pair of canvases we are presenting are dated December 1794, and are perhaps the first amorous subjects painted by Fournier; if the women's attire is still "sensible", the costumes of their suitors announce the Incroyables of the Directory. As for the masculine attitudes bordering on eagerness, they do not seem to offend these young women more than that, rather flattered, amused and consenting; one of the scenes could also correspond to a print by Frédéric Jean Wolff (known as the Elder), another engraver of Boilly, after Fournier, titled The Accepted Bouquet, and captioned "I like it when you put it down". In France, only the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse preserves a work by Fournier, previously presented as by Boilly, and identified by Carole Blumenfeld.