This work had long been attributed to Jean Siméon Chardin. There are various old inscriptions and labels on the canvas and the frame referring to Chardin as the painter and to Joseph Vernet – the executor of Chardin’s estate - as the sitter. However, comparison with the famous portrait of his son Carle Vernet (1758–1836) by Nicolas-Bernard Lépicié in the Louvre (Inv.Nr. R.F. 671bis) confirms that he is the sitter. The monogram J.B.S.C. on the drawing folder held by the boy probably led to the mistaken attribution of the painting to Chardin. It seems that after his death, the latter was erroneously registered under the first name of Jean-Baptiste Siméon (instead of Jean Siméon). (s. Florence Bruyant in Chardin, exhibition catalogue, Paris a.o.1999, p. 25, Archives nationales, M.C., LVI, 246).
The painting has been cleaned recently and the restorer believes that the monogram may have been added slightly later. It is possible that the painting, like the above-mentioned portrait by Lépicié, once belonged to the Vernet family.
We are very grateful to Helen Ashmore, Princeton, for the following entry and Dr. Dorothee Hansen, Kunsthalle Bremen for visual material and for giving us the possibility to compare both works in the original.
Catherine Lusurier lived with, and was trained by, the two older painters of the Drouais family; her aunt, Marie Marguerite, was wife to Drouais senior. Whilst Drouais’ father and son tended to their royal patrons, she recorded likenesses of artists and intellectuals. Her best-known portrait is in the Louvre: that of Germain-Jean Drouais, son of Drouais the younger, and a favourite student and colleague of Jacques Louis David. In the Carnavalet hangs her portrait of Jean le Rond D'Alembert who, as well as being the Permanent Secretary of the Academie Française, was also arguably the most important intellectual in France.
In 1927, the funerary sculpture expert M.-E. Sainte-Beauve discovered two more portraits by Lusurier; those of the wife of the great bibliophile Guillaume de Bure, Charlotte-Françoise (nee Didot) and her daughter. In 1956 Gunter Busch, then Director of the Kunsthalle Bremen, purchased from Andre de Haspe in Paris a beautiful painting of a Little Girl Artist that was so similar to the known portraits that he attributed it to Catherine Lusurier. In over ten years of art and archival research, I have gathered evidence and, in all but one case, images on twenty portraits signed by or attributed to her. (see Helen Ashmore, "Catherine Lusurier", Apollo Magazine, May 2001.)
Of the six paintings recently proposed for attribution to Catherine Lusurier, the one presented here is by far the best candidate. When set alongside the portraits of Germain-Jean Drouais and the Bremen Little Artist it can be seen to be very close stylistically; the posture and gesture are similar as is the way the subject engages the viewer, an unusual attribute of petit colier paintings. In the works of Chardin and Lépicié, for example, the Little Artist almost always looks away. It was Lusurier's mentor Drouais the younger who caused a sensation at the Salon of 1755 or 1761 with his Petit Polisson, little rascal, who looks back at the viewer with directness and candour.
In the case of the Bremen portrait, the similarities increase: the palettes have neutral backgrounds set off by vivid colours of the clothes: rust with white fabric at the neck. The texture and draping of the white fabric of his scarf and her bodice are almost identical; the portfolios are very alike. But the most striking feature in common is the beautiful way in which the eyes are painted. Evidence for Lusurier’s exceptional skill in the painting of eyes can be seen in her copy of a Largillière portrait at Versailles, commissioned by the State and purchased c. 1778.
This portrait does something none of the others do: it supports existing evidence that Lusurier once worked in Lépicié’s studio. A Lépicié self-portrait that passed through the Cuvillier Collection in 1932 shows an almost identical representation of a wig and jacket. Other similarities are too numerous to mention here.
This could be the second time in a short period that a painting has emerged as a Lusurier after having been wrongly attributed to a better-known artist. Evidence has shown that the Milwaukee Art Museum painting of a Little Girl with Flowers attributed to Drouais fils and signed with a signature he never used - is in fact the portrait of Charlotte DeBure by Lusurier shown in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts article by Sainte Beuve in 1927. (Unreleased manuscript by the author.)



At the time of Catherine Lusurier´s death at age 28, the Memoirs Secrets noted: “The arts have had a true loss in the person of Mlle Luzurier…”