François Bonvin (1817–1887) | Sophie Unternährer painting at the Easel | Private Collection, London
Signed and dated, lower right, F. Bonvin [18]48
Oil on original canvas
242 x 187 mm
PROVENANCE
Paul Bureau, his sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 24 May 1927, lot 239
LITERATURE
A. Berès (et al.), Francois Bonvin, The Master of the Realist School, 1999, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Galerie Berès, and Pittsburgh, The Frick Art Museum, under cat. no. 19 (as lost)
Long considered lost until its recent rediscovery, this painting shows the painter Sophie Unternährer, working at her easel. Unternährer was the sister of Eléonore, better known as Nonore, Bonvin’s mistress in 1848-49. A finished preparatory drawing for our painting, also signed and dated 1848 is in a private collection, England [1]. The two sisters were the granddaughters of the Swiss Anton Unternährer (1759-1824), a carpenter by training who became a charlatan doctor, writer and founder of a sect that rejected most tenets of Christian morality. He spent much of his later life until his death in 1824 in prison in Lucerne. Several portrait drawings of Eléonore, all dating from 1848-49, survive [2]. Our painting was executed during the year of the Revolution, a year after Bonvin’s first participation at the Salon, where he exhibited a single painting, a portrait of M. Chalamet. In his review of the Salon of 1847, Théophile Gautier listed Bonvin in the section of portrait painters, calling his work ‘vigoureux et sombre’[3]. This judgement appears equally true of the present painting, which reveals forceful brush strokes combined with a restrained palette. The lighting as well as the rendering of the interior further reflects Bonvin’s well-known admiration for Dutch seventeenth-century painting, which he studied regularly at the Louvre after finishing his day work at the préfecture de police in Paris. Bonvin and the Unternährer sisters belonged to a circle of friends, called the groupe de la bohème, which included the painter Courbet and the early promoter of the realist movement, the writer and art critic Jules François Felix Fleury-Husson, called Champfleury.
NOTES
[1] G. Weisberg, Bonvin, Paris, 1979, p. 257, cat. no. 230.
[2] Berès (et al.), op. cit., cat. nos. 16-18, 22, all illustrated.
[3] T. Gautier, Salon de 1847, p. 159.