Pauline Augustin, née Ducruet
On July 8, 1800 Augustin married his student Pauline Ducruet. Although Pauline adopted her husband's painting style and technique her work lacks the energetic and vivid intensity in the sitters' faces found in Augustin's miniatures and give a rather mawkish impression. Painting a large-scale miniature was time-consuming and required a lot of patience. 1 Augustin's first large-scale miniature was his famous self-portrait (1796) which was followed by portraits of the sculptors Callamard (1801) and Chaudet (1804). In 1808 he painted his wife, in 1819 followed a large-scale portrait of Thomas Weld and his daughter. Augustin's extraordinarily delicate painting technique found no sympathy among his contemporaries 2 and was no longer employed after his death. A small reproduction of this portrait is also intimated on a watercolour showing his studio (1810). Pauline Augustin kept this miniature as long as she lived. As it was not auctioned off with the rest of Augustin's miniatures, it was still in the family estate around the middle of the 20th century. 3
1 The preparation of the painting support is explained in: Otten, Pappe und Schmieglitz-Otten, 2000, p. 20.
2 For example the English miniaturist Andrew Robertson. See Robertson 1897, p. 245.
3 Apart from this miniature, Baroness de Saint-Palais possessed several other pieces from Augustin's estate, e.g. his painting desk and numerous notebooks.
