Active during the second half of the eighteenth century, Catherine Lusurier is now recognised as one of the French women painters whose oeuvre is gradually being rediscovered. Long overshadowed by the prominent male figures within her artistic circle, her body of work remains relatively limited, owing to her untimely death at the age of twenty-eight. Signed and dated, the present portrait makes a significant contribution to the artist’s currently identified corpus.
The marriage of her aunt, Marie-Marguerite Lusurier, who came from a family of Parisian hosiers, to Hubert Drouais allowed Catherine Lusurier to be raised within one of the most celebrated portrait studios of her time. Trained first by her uncle Hubert and subsequently by her cousin François-Hubert Drouais, she demonstrated remarkable artistic talent from an early age. A presumed self-portrait of the artist depicts a very young painter whose reserved demeanour conveys a certain restraint; her steady gaze, the assured manner in which she leans against a large canvas, and the relaxed hand holding the brush, by contrast testify to a genuine awareness of her artistic vocation. Although the execution remains freely sketched, the painting already displays the defining qualities of Lusurier’s style: a striking sense of immediacy coupled with remarkable expressive intensity.
The present painting ranks among the most accomplished works of the artist’s maturity. It depicts a young musician holding a violin in an upright and composed pose, conveying the concentration inherent in learning the instrument, played pizzicato (with the strings plucked by the fingers). The handling of the paint conveys the softness of the youthful face, while the delicacy of the fingers reflects the attention devoted to the expressiveness of the gesture. Striking parallels may be drawn with the Portrait of Jean-Germain Drouais in the Musée du Louvre. Both paintings adopt an oval composition set against a neutral background of subtly modulated grey-green tones, gently lightened towards the centre. Each depicts a youthful sitter shown half-length, turned three-quarters, and positioned slightly off-centre, thereby assigning comparable prominence to the accompanying attribute, a sketchbook in the Louvre painting and a violin in the present work. The treatment of the faces reveals equally close affinities: a pale complexion enlivened by delicate pink highlights on the cheeks, modelled by a soft shadow cast across one side of the face. The small, gently rounded noses are paired with a subtle indentation above the upper lip. Finally, the hairstyles are remarkably similar, with soft curls partially revealing the right ear, rendered in an almost identical manner in both paintings. These correspondences, both in composition and in physiognomic treatment, place the present portrait within the same stylistic and chronological context as the Louvre painting. The Latin inscription accompanying the Portrait of Jean-Germain Drouais records that the sitter was fifteen years old when portrayed, allowing both works to be dated to 1778. This represents a moment of full artistic maturity within Catherine Lusurier’s relatively limited production, marking the culmination of her pictorial language.
Leading collectors and intellectuals were quick to recognise the artist’s talent. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert sat for a remarkable portrait by her, which later entered the collection of Pierre Rémy, director of the Académie de Saint-Luc [1] . The Baron Robert de Rothschild also owned one of her portraits in 1926 [2] .
The rediscovery of her work, however, is a relatively recent phenomenon [3] . The close affinity between her production, devoted primarily to portraits of women and children, and that of François-Hubert Drouais contributed to the obscuring of her corpus: many of her paintings were confused with, or more or less deliberately reattributed to, those of her cousin. The case of the Portrait of Charlotte DeBure is particularly revealing. Dated 1776, the painting bore a signature identical in format to that of our picture, “C.ne Lusurier”, confirming the artist’s use of this form. Although the signature was recorded by Sainte-Beuve in their article published in the Gazette in 1926, it was altered when the painting entered the American art market, apparently to facilitate its acquisition by the Milwaukee Art Museum, where it is now held with the apocryphal inscription “F. H. Drouais”. Whereas in the 1920s the authority of the Drouais name ensured greater commercial value, perceptions have gradually shifted, and Catherine Lusurier’s work is now reclaiming its rightful place within the history of eighteenth-century French portraiture.
The stylistic differences between the two artists become particularly apparent when the present portrait of a young violinist is compared with a work of the same subject painted by François-Hubert Drouais a few years earlier. Although both works share a similar oval format, comparable dimensions, and an almost identical arrangement of the sitter, Drouais favours a more decorative manner, distinguished by an elegant treatment of fabrics and a highly polished rendering of flesh that earned him the epithet of the painter of “ plaster-like faces” [4] . Lusurier, by contrast, adopts a more restrained palette and directs her attention towards the truthful depiction of the sitter.
The brevity of Lusurier’s career has left us with only a small number of dated works: the earliest, the Portrait of a Man in the Musée Carnavalet (inv. P219) of 1770, the Portrait of Charlotte DeBure of 1776, the remarkable Portrait of d’Alembert of 1777, followed by that of Jean-Germain Drouais in 1778, and the present painting among the last known works executed before her death in 1781. Through this Portrait of a Young Violinist, Catherine Lusurier fully demonstrates the qualities that define her art: expressive immediacy and a rare ability to capture the quiet inner life of her sitters. Standing at the intersection of the official portrait tradition of the Drouais family and a more sensitive naturalism, her work is today regaining its rightful place in the history of French portraiture, firmly establishing Lusurier as one of the most significant women artists of the late eighteenth century.
D. G.
