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Photograph © The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
40
ArtistFrench, active Paris (?) c. 1600-1650

Portrait of an Old Man

c. 1600–1625
Black and red chalk with ochre wash on laid paper
Sheet: 16 1/2 × 11 9/16 in. (41.9 × 29.3 cm)
The Edith A. and Percy S. Straus Collection
44.536
Bibliography

Bjurström, Per. French Drawings: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 1976.

Goldfarb, Hilliard T. From Fontainebleau to the Louvre: French Drawings from the Seventeenth Century. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1989.  

Oberhuber, Konrad, ed., Renaissance and Baroque Drawings from the Collection of John and Alice Steiner. Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, 1977.

Pariset, François-Georges. “Bellange et Lagneau ou le Maniérisme et le Réalisme en France après 1600.” Latin American Art, and the Baroque Period in Europe, Studies in Western art, Acts of the Twentieth International Congress of the History of Art 3 (1963): 129–41. 

Schenk, Eberhard. “Un Album de ‘Lagneau’ provenant de Thouars?” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 97, (May–June 1981): 189–200.

Sharp, Ellen. The Collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts: Italian, French, English, and Spanish Drawings and Watercolors Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1992.

ProvenanceCollection Montauson; [Wildenstein & Co., New York, as of 1937 (as by Dumonstier)]; Edith and Percy Straus collection, 1937–1944; bequeathed to MFAH, 1944.

The drawn portrait was popular at the French royal court and among the nobility in the seventeenth century. The drawing was formerly thought to be by one of the members of the Dumonstier family of painters, who also painted primarily portraits of the French royal family. However, this sheet seems more likely to be by Nicolas Lagneau, still an unidentified artist who specialized in colored chalk portrayals of extreme realism. Fascinated with the physiognomy of old age, Lagneau frequently drew elderly sitters from the middle class with a penetrating directness inspired by the early work of Rembrandt. Here, he has applied red chalk on top of black chalk to intensify the sitter’s lips, eyes, and wrinkles, and the curls of his hair.1 This sheet can be associated with two groups of drawings under the Lagneau name in the Musée du Louvre and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (fig. 40.1).

—Dena M. Woodall

Notes

1. This portrait drawing has similarities to another drawing once on the art market. See London, Christie’s, Important Old Master Drawings, 25 June, 1974, lot 135. The drawing should also be compared to Lagneau portrait drawings in the Louvre, such as inv. no. 1148.

Comparative Images

Fig. 40.1. Nicolas Lagneau, Bald Man with Long Beard, from Album Nicolas Lagneau, folio 39, cha ...
Fig. 40.1. Nicolas Lagneau, Bald Man with Long Beard, from Album Nicolas Lagneau, folio 39, chalk, black stone, sanguine on brown paper, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photograph by Thierry Le Mage © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY  

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