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L'Huillier & Associés - Ventes aux enchères

65 - FRENCH school of the late eighteenth century Portrait of a h…
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Estimate 100 € - 200 €
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Description
FRENCH school of the late eighteenth century Portrait of a harpist, possibly Madame de Genlis Octagonal miniature. 7.8 x 7.2 cm At the end of the 18th century, the harp became very popular. In the capital, a number of Parisian makers (the Louvet brothers, Renault & Chatelain, Cousineau père & fils, Naderman) rubbed shoulders with several makers from Germany (Krupp, Godefroy, Henry, Jean Baptiste Holtzman, Zimmermann). Around sixty teachers were listed for the year 1784. Marie-Antoinette's name is inseparable from the history of the harp in France, but another woman played a significant role: Mademoiselle de Saint Aubain, who took the name of Comtesse de Genlis in 1764 after her marriage to the Marquis de Sillery, Comte de Genlis. Now a harp master herself, Madame de Genlis discovered the harp in the Paris salon of Alexandre Jean-Joseph Le Riche de La Pouplinière. Like Beaumarchais (1732-1799), her teacher was the celebrated virtuoso Georges Adam Goepfert. Among the many aristocratic and bourgeois salons that sprang up in the eighteenth century as venues for private concerts, the La Pouplinière salon stood out for its intense artistic activity. In particular, it employed two German harpists. It was also at the Concert Spirituel that French audiences heard harp virtuosos, notably Christian Hochbrucker and Philippe-Jacques Meyer (1737-1819). Harp literature was extremely abundant in the 1780s, when fashionable opera arias were marketed in the form of arrangements. Several great harpists left works that are still part of the repertoire: in addition to Christian Hochbrucker and Philippe-Jacques Meyer, author of the first harp method in 1763, Jean-Baptiste Krumpholtz played an important role in the development of harp writing, as did Francesco Petrini (1744-1819) and Jacques Georges Cousineau (1760-1824), son of Georges, and Jean François Joseph Naderman (1781-1835), son of Jean Henri. At the turn of the century, the vogue for James Macpherson's Ossianic poetry and for Ariosto renewed interest in the harp, which evoked Celtic antiquity and conveyed a certain exoticism of the North. Under the Empire, Jean-François Le Sueur introduced twelve harps into a romance in his opera Ossian ou les Bardes (1804) and Etienne-Nicolas Méhul used the instrument in his romantic overture to Uthal (1806). Adrien Boieldieu composed a Concerto for harp in 1800.
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About the sale Furniture and Works of Art - PAS EN LIVE
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Auction time 05/06/2026 à 14h00
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