Jean-françois Bellier, Pair Of Portraits, His Sister Philippine And Her Husband Edme Bochet, Circa 1800

French School, late 18th and early 19th century, pair of portraits depicting the Bochet couple, Françoise Philippine Bellier (1746-1809) and Edme Firmin Bochet (1742-1837). She, during the Directory period in the 1790s, wears a striped silk muslin dress, a white gauze scarf, and a powdered wig topped with a Creole-style cap. He, during the Consulate, wears a high-ranking civil servant's uniform in dark green velvet embroidered with ears of wheat in silver thread, the silver buttons bearing the initials of the French Republic. Underneath, he wears a white waistcoat and a cambric cravat. On the lapel of his coat is the cross of an Officer of the Legion of Honor. He also wears a powdered wig, a reminder of his adherence to the customs of high society under the Ancien Régime. This second portrait is titled Bochet, signed Bellier, and dated 1804. The two oval portraits are displayed together in identical oak frames, decorated with a row of pearls and water leaves, and gilded with gold leaf. Jean François Marie Bellier (1745-1836), a portrait and landscape painter, received royal commissions under the Ancien Régime: he was the painter to Queen Marie Antoinette, and he completed the paintings for the carriage used by Louis XVI on the day of his coronation. He worked on the ceilings of the Louvre with Barthélémy. Formal portraits signed by him can be found from the Directory and Empire periods. It is interesting to discover intimate works by this talented painter and to learn more about his family, about whom little is known until now. The portrait of Edme Bochet is signed by Bellier, but not the portrait of his wife. Both paintings are by the same hand, and she was portrayed almost ten years before her husband. Her maiden name was Bellier, like the painter's, and the fact that she was the daughter of Nicolas Fixé Bellier, a master painter in 18th-century Paris, along with her birth year after him, suggests that Jean-François and Françoise-Philippine were in fact brother and sister. The portrait of her is a personal work, likely a gift from brother to sister. The portrait of her husband, on the other hand, is an official portrait intended to solidify the social advancement of a high-ranking civil servant during the Consulate and the Empire; it was commissioned by the sister from her brother. Edme Firmin Bochet (1720–1837) was a tax collector and registrar of registration fees, a central position in the management of public finances. He married Françoise-Philippine in 1770 at the Church of Saint-Roch in Paris and served under three major political regimes (Ancien Régime, Revolution, Empire), maintaining his position, thus illustrating the continuity of certain French administrative elites. Among the children of Françoise Philippine Bellier and Edme Firmin Bochet, Edme Bochet and his sister Cécile Bochet had the honor of being immortalized by Ingres in 1811. Their portraits, now in the Louvre, are invaluable examples of Neoclassical art and the place of Parisian bourgeois families in early 19th-century culture. These are fine paintings by amateurs, worthy of a museum, with great attention paid to facial expressions, skin tone, hair, and the details of clothing and uniforms. They are in very good condition, with both paintings and frames cleaned by our conservators. Previously relined. Frame dimensions: 77.5 x 66.5 cm and 78.5 x 67 cm. Canvas dimensions: 53 x 65 cm.