Jean-Baptiste Joseph Le Tellier
Lady in White Dress with Miniature on Necklace
Around the mid-1790s the dark-haired lady with the extravagantly cut tulle dress had her portrait taken by Le Tellier. She chose a monochrome background and did without a pose depicting her hands - thus deciding on a comparatively less elaborate and consequently cost-saving miniature. Fixed to the multiple strings of her golden necklace she is wearing an oval locket, which possibly contains a picture of the miniature' s addressee. The message of the portrait would read in this case "I am thinking of you". The decentralization of the model towards the left part of the picture - known for instance from Périn' s miniatures - combined with the sitter' s different angle of body and head was the artist' s method of intensifying the vitality of his representation 1 .Le Tellier' s miniatures differ considerably from each other as to style and painting technique. Whereas some - like this miniature - are executed very delicately reproducing the sitter' s face according to stereotype with small curved mouth and a narrow longish nose, the faces in other miniatures show an extremely expressive individuality, painted with broad brush strokes 2 . His 18th century miniatures tend to have a greenish tint due to the fading of the red pigments in the shades of the incarnate parts 3 . As to their colours, however, his works of the 19th century are better preserved 4 . Presumably Le Tellier now heeded the advice of his friend Jean-Baptiste Augustin, who researched colours and their highest possible stability, and whose miniatures have retained a high degree of colour-fastness.
B.P.
1 Le Tellier nearly always presented his sitters in a slanting body position facing the observer almost from the front.
2 This miniature, as many other slightly paler miniatures, purchased at the auctioneer Christie' s, show amateurishly applied red pigments in the facial parts on the back of the ivory sheet. Obviously the portraits had been "made up" before the sale. These misrepresenting modern interferences had been eliminated in the course of recent restorations. Cf. cat.-no. 2005-6, 2005-25, 2005-36, 2005-49, 2005-53, 2005-89, 2005-113, 2005-148, 2005-151 and 2005-152.
3 A principle work of this group is the larger-format picture (more than 20 cm large) of a naked lady chastising Cupid. It is illustrated in Jeannerat 1957, p. 233.
4 Cf. the portrait of a lady, painted in circa 1810 in the collection of the Museum Briner and Kern, Winterthur.
