Page 151 - Pierre Durand Collection Including Chinese Art and Porcelain Sothebys Jan 27 2022

•184 THIS LOT IS OFFERED WITHOUT RESERVE
MARTIN DRÖLLING (OBERBERGHEIM, NEAR COLMAR 1752-1817 Masters’. Like Louis-Léopold Boilly and Marguerite Gérard, he depicted
PARIS) everyday scenes with an attention to detail which deliberately recalled the
Portrait of a young woman, seated, near a fountain in a landscape high finish and refined articulation of paintings by Gerrit Dou, David Teniers
and Frans van Mieris.
signed 'Drolling . p.' (lower center)
oil on canvas
9 x 7√ in. (22.7 x 17.2 cm.)
$12,000-18,000 The present, small-scale genre painting, which is signed on its face and
dated ‘1806’ on the reverse of the canvas, depicts a pretty young girl wearing
PROVENANCE:
a fashionable white, high-waisted Empire dress with short sleeves, as
Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 8 December 1995, lot 294, where
was the style around 1805, and red wool shawl, her hair dressed in cedilla
acquired by Covent Garden Gallery, on behalf of the present owner.
curls à la antique. She sits alone beside a fountain that takes the form of
an ancient column, in an overgrown ‘English’-style garden. At her feet is
Born near Colmar, on the Prussian border, Martin Drölling’s early life is
a blue vase which has broken into pieces. The influence of seventeenth-
obscure. He studied drawing at Schlestadt and moved to Paris in 1780
century Dutch painting is evident in the shimmering sheen with which
when he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts. He exhibited at the Salon de
Drölling meticulously renders her satin dress, evidently inspired by Gerard
la Correspondance beginning in 1781 and at the Paris Salon from 1793 to
ter Borch. The prominent and somewhat incongruously placed broken vase
1817. Drölling’s art was almost exclusively devoted to portraiture and genre
imbues the picture with an element of suggested narrative, serving as a
painting in the then-popular style of the seventeenth-century Dutch ‘Little
gentle admonition against the dangers of passion, its shattered form a well-
established symbol of fallen virtue.
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