Jeune femme tenant sa correspondance dans son boudoir

Medium: Oil On Canvas
Size: 80 x 62 cm

Trinquesse, a masterful painter best-known for his red chalk drawings of women made popular in the 19^th century, had three models who frequently posed for him. However in his oeuvre the three are near indistinguishable from each another. We cannot be sure of the sitter in the painting here, for Trinquesse’s interest lay not just in the particular features of a sitter, but in his or her sophisticated dress, languid pose, or well-appointed apartment interior. Madame de Framery possibly sat for this work, also the subject of numerous drawings. However two other women, Louise-Elisabeth Bain and Louise-Charlotte Marini were regular models and all three women shared delicate features and powdered, curled hair.

Trinquesse studied both portraiture and genre painting at the Académie Royale from 1758 to at least 1770. His portraits of women appear celebrations of beauty and femininity -gentle and uncomplicated likenesses painted in strong rococo colours. Portraits such as Trinquesse’s of the Abbé Gentil (1783, Musées Bagnols-sur-Cèze) were more sombre affairs which presented imposing representations of their subject’s character. The artist's genre painting incorporated his blither style of portraiture into elegant scenes that followed the in the tradition of Watteau. If not quite fête galante scenes of love and dalliance, Trinquesse brought Watteau’s romance to contemporary genre scenes, more often set in sumptuously decorated, intimate interiors.

A petit maître during the reign of Louis XVI, Trinquesse, like Fragonard, refused to submit the Academy’s requisite history painting. Though both artists trained at the Académie Royale, apathetic to the Director’s preference for stoic history subjects, they exhibited at the Salon de la Correspondance -an independent society devoted to the encouragement of the arts and sciences. Never becoming an académicien or even agréé, Trinquesse still earned, and in his lifetime, a respected reputation as a portraitist. He counted among his patrons the Vicomtesse de Laval, the governor of Paris and the Duc de Cossé-Brissac. In the nineteenth century, the Goncourt brothers collected Trinquesse's drawings, which as a result, today are probably the artist's most familiar works.

As in Interior with two ladies and a gentleman (sold at Christies, 2006) the smaller work owes its story 'to the portrayals of intrigues among the fashionable bourgeoisie by the earlier generation of French artists, such as de Troy, Watteau, and Boucher. But rather than being regressive in outlook, Trinquesse's painting anticipates the highly polished 'Metsu Manner' of the genre scenes of Marguerite Gérard and Louis-Léopold Boilly'.[i] This intimate scene of an élégante fingering a letter in her private apartments suggests a plot instantly; the viewer is left to wonder what gossip, declaration of love or sisterly story fills these pages. That the news clearly pleases we understand for the girl’s soft smile. She meets the viewer’s gaze with shy eyes and a coy unworried pose.  Her blue taffeta dress clearly preoccupied and delighted Trinquesse. The small Papillion puppy is no doubt meant to amuse us having too a letter ‘in-hand.’

Trinquesse's creates dramatic tension with the thick letter and smile; her casual intimacy builds a restraint erotic tone to the work even. What is being said and why is a matter of conjecture; what is clear is Trinquesse's technical brilliance and mastery of genre painting’s comedy and drama.

[i] J. Collins, The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masters of French Genre Painting, Ottawa, 2003, cat. no. 101, pp. 326