Jean Antoine Laurent
Lady in Blue Dress
With her soft, sensitive and mildly pensive expression the young lady in a blue dress represents a characteristic portrayal within Laurent' s oeuvre of the 1790s. The attribution to the miniaturist coming from Baccarat was confirmed on the occasion of the miniature' s recent restoration: the hardly legible, curved L with which Laurent often signed his works was identified in the background on the right. The biography on Laurent by Haldat du Lys in 1833, until now hardly taken note of, describes the miniaturist as a versatile, creative and sophisticated artist 1 . Coming from Lorraine to Paris as a young man like Augustin and Isabey, he was soon to realize that to survive as an artist - considering his capabilities and the strong competition - he had to give up his inclination for landscape and genre painting and take up portrait painting instead. In the 1790s Laurent enriched the province of miniature portraits by his invention of large-format miniatures, which could measure up to 25 x 20 cm and which were better suited to his creative ambitions (cf .p....). In these works he often painted the faces in the usual small format on ivory sheets and later inserted them in large cardboard panels, thus being able to present his sitters in full figure in a rural setting. Laurent' s genre and history paintings, executed in oil in the manner of fine Dutch painting of the 17th century, are completely forgotten today 2 . Although Haldat praised these pictures effusively as Laurent' s principal achievements, the artist is mainly remembered today as an outstanding miniaturist of the late 18th and early 19th century.
B.P.
1 Cf. Haldat du Lys 1833. The short biography had been given as a lecture by the author himself in Nancy in the same year, in commemoration of the miniaturist.
2 A good example is the oil painting with the title Ein Schlosser lässt einen Eichelhäher in seine Feile beissen, painted by Laurent in 1829 in the Dutch style after a fable by La Fontaine (Louvre, Paris).
