This charming portrait of a young boy is the work of Louise-Marie-Jeanne Hersent, a little-known woman artist of the French Restoration often identified by her maiden name, Mauduit. While Hersent—as we will call her here following the signature on the painting—has been understudied, the known details of her life and career reveal that she held a privileged position in artistic life in the early nineteenth century in Paris. She exhibited at the Salon from 1810 until 1824, and in 1821 she married the painter Louis Hersent, a successful pupil of Jacques-Louis David who was patronized by Louis XVIII and Charles X. It is likely through her husband’s royal patronage that Hersent’s Louis XIV Visits Peter the Great was purchased for the Royal Collection in Versailles.
In 1806, while still Louise Mauduit, she painted a portrait of Napoleon’s youngest sister, Pauline Bonaparte, soon after her marriage to Prince Camillo Borghese (Fig. 1). The portrait is nearly contemporary with Canova’s famous marble of her naked, Paolina Borghese as Venus Victrix (Villa Borghese, Rome), dated 1805–1808. The high status of her subject indicates that the artist was well-connected in her own right before her marriage, but little is known about her initial artistic training.
It has been assumed that Hersent was a student of Charles Meynier, as well as her husband. However, it has gone unnoticed that an album assembled by Constance-Marie Charpentier with sketches by her pupils includes a drawing by the artist inscribed “Julie Constance [the daughter of Charpentier] en 1810 en 1811” and “par Mlle Mauduit” (Fig. 2). Although she has fallen into relative obscurity, Charpentier had the distinction of being one of the only female students of Jacques Louis-David, whose workshop she entered in 1787 at twenty years old. She was a specialist in portraiture and later in life, following the death of her husband, she supported herself primarily by training female students in her home on the rue du Pot de fer Saint-Sulpice (today the rue Bonaparte). This undoubtedly had an influence on Louise, who similarly specialized in portraiture and ran a studio to instruct women artists, among whom were the porcelain painter Marie Virginie Boquet and the portraitist Louise Adélaïde Desnos. The artist’s appearance is recorded in a drawing by François Joseph Heim—executed as a sketch for his group portrait of artists receiving awards from Charles X for their Salon entries in 1824—as well as in a portrait by her student, Louise Adélaïde Desnos (Figs. 3-4).
Prominently signed and dated 1823, our portrait was painted by Hersent within the first few years of her marriage. The boy is elegantly dressed in a dark blue coat and a bright white shirt with a gold pin placed in his white jabot. With the boy’s body positioned in three-quarter view and his face appearing fully frontally, this bust-length portrait is straightforward in presentation, yet the artist has added interest and emphasized the subject’s youth through the inclusion of the few small strands of hair that fall on his forehead and in the depiction of the collar with one side turned upward. A similar portrait of a boy is in the collection of the Bowes Museum (Fig. 5). Dated 1815, this portrait provides another example of Hersent’s ability to create sensitive images of youth, and also serves as a useful point of comparison, as it reveals the artist’s maturation over the course of eight years to the mature style exhibited in our painting. A Portrait of a Young Woman in a White Dress with a Cashmere Shawl dated 1828 (Fig. 6) shows further development to a more Romantic treatment of both figure and costume.
Our canvas is stamped on the reverse with the mark of the noted artist supplier Belot, located at 3 rue de L’Arbre Sec in Paris.