A pupil of Jean-Baptiste Le Prince and the animal painter Charles Dagomer, Jean-Baptiste Huet was accepted into the Académie Royale as an animalier in 1769. The following year he made his debut at the Salon, where his paintings of animals, indebted to the example of Jean-Baptiste Oudry, were admired by critics. He had a particular liking for pastoral genre subjects, often with shepherds or herders, in which the influence of François Boucher is evident. He also found inspiration in the work of the Dutch genre painters of the 17th century. In 1794 he was appointed peintre du roi, and in addition produced designs for the Beauvais tapestry factory. Huet was an extremely accomplished draughtsman, and many of his drawings were published as engravings, usually by the printmaker Gilles Demarteau. Between 1765 and 1770 Huet painted a series of pastoral landscapes and animal subjects to decorate the interior of
Demarteau’s house in Paris, a project to which both Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard also contributed.
The present sheet is related to a series of paintings of the Four Times of Day, each set in fictive circular stone frames. Exhibited as a group at the Salon of 1773, these four small paintings (the other three being Le Matin, Le Midi and L'Après-Midi) were reproduced as black and red chalk-manner engravings (1) by Gilles Demarteau, who specialized in this type of coloured print. The engravings of the Four Times of Day list the owner of the original drawings as a M. Nera. This was apparently the pseudonym of a Dutch collector, the daughter of the poet Van Haren (2), who owned a large number of drawings by Huet. A signed watercolour related to Le Matin, another painting in the series, was on the Paris art market in 1934 (3).
The present sheet is dated 1790, and may be a later souvenir of the 1773 Salon painting. It is also possible, however, that the drawing was a preparatory study for the painting or for Demarteau's engraving, and was signed and dated by the artist several years later, when the drawing came to be sold. While unusual, a handful of other examples of this practice by Huet are known (4).
This drawing was at one time part of the exceptional collection of 18th and early 19th century French drawings assembled by Alfred Beurdeley (1847-1919).
Notes
1. The latter three are illustrated in Gabillot, op.cit., pp.11, 13 and 15, respectively. The engravings were priced at 3 livres each; Marcel Roux, Bibliothèque Nationale: Inventaire du fonds français: Graveurs du XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 1949, Vol.VI, p.481, nos.546-549.
2. According to Roux, ibid., p.466, under no.477.
3. Vente Gallice, Paris, Galerie Charpentier, 25 May 1834, lot 20 (as Le Passage de Gué).
4. See, for example, a chalk Study of a Plant, signed and dated twice, in 1767 and 1769; London, Kate de Rothschild at Alan Jacobs Gallery, Exhibition of Old Master Drawings, 1984, no.20.
