¤ Nicolas CHAPERON (1612-1654/55) - Lot 12

Lot n° 12
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¤ Nicolas CHAPERON (1612-1654/55) - Lot 12
¤ Nicolas CHAPERON (1612-1654/55) "Wildlife and its young" Oil on canvas 59 x 45.1 cm A young girl sitting against a tree and holding her cub, is offered a bunch of grapes by a satyr. The layout of our painting illustrates the concerns of Chaperon, whose secular work is mostly made up of bacchanals. Freely taken from the texts of Ovid or the contemporary Giambattista Marino, these subjects were very popular in the 17th century. The composition of Le Faune et sa faunesse can be found in the "Recueil de diverses Bacchanales" published by François Langlois, then taken up by Pierre Mariette. The "fauna and its youth" is one of the plates of the collection including ten etchings signed by Chaperon "inventor and engraver". Thanks to the estimated dating of the collection, we can place our work before 1639. The technique attests to certain specificities of Chaperon. The layout is off-centre, grouping the figures together and leaving a vast space for nature filled with poetry. The massive shoulders of the fauna seen from the back evoke those of the shepherd sitting in the foreground in "The nurture of Jupiter (The Ackland Art Museum). The head of the child looking at the fauna can be compared to that of the "Infant Jesus held by Saint Joseph" in a drawing kept in the Louvre Museum. Sylvain Laveissière, in his exhibition catalogue devoted to Chaperon, reminds us that the horned satyr, whose bald and bumpy skull seen from above, is in a way the artist's signature. We know from the mention "Chaperon inventor et pinxit" written on the board of "Enfants jouer avec un bouc", that Chaperon had painted the compositions he engraved in this collection. It is particularly interesting to be able to link the painting to the engraving that came from it. Chaperon entered the studio of Louis XIII's first painter Simon Vouet around 1632. His original works, of which we have traces as early as 1634, generally
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