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signed lower right: Alfred de Dreux

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

Chaix d'Est-Ange Collection (sale: Galerie Charpentier, Paris, 11 December 1934);
Sale: Sotheby's London, 26 June 1963, lot 81;
Leggatts (acquired at the above sale);
Acquired by the late Bobby Wills from the above
EXHIBITED

Paris, Galerie de la Fédération des Artistes, Equipages et cavaliers 1830-1930, n.d., no. 65
CATALOGUE NOTE

De Dreux was among the most celebrated and successful nineteenth-century French equestrian painters. His uncle, the painter Pierre-Joseph Dedreux-Dorcy, was an intimate friend of Théodore Géricault, whose atelier De Dreux frequented from an early age, and whose choice of subjects, especially horses, had a lasting influence on him.

During the 1820s, he studied with Léon Coigniet, although his early style was more influenced by the work of George Stubbs, George Morland, John Constable, and Edwin Landseer, exposure to whose work probably came through Géricault and Eugène Lami, who lived in London in the 1820s.

De Dreux himself travelled to England twice, once in 1844, and again at the outbreak of the 1848 revolution. There, the exiled French King, Louis-Philippe, introduced him to Queen Victoria, paving the way to numerous Court commissions. He painted for the duc d'Aumale in Twickenham, and among his most famous portraits painted in England was that of the young Comte de Paris and Duc de Chartres on horseback in Claremont Park.

It was in England that De Dreux perfected his observation of horses and riders in the landscape. Inspired by the great eighteenth-century portraitists, by the landscapes of Constable and Bonington, and by the sporting painters John Frederick Herring and John Ferneley, de Dreux developed a unique style that gained immediate popularity with patrons and collectors alike.

The sitter for the present work is probably Charles-René Marie, son of Comte de Brémond d'Ars (who died in 1838) and his wife Marie-Eutrope-Mélanie de Sartre. On 16th August 1870 he married Louise de Goullard d'Arsay. It is likely that the work was painted in England, and that the Brémond d'Ars family was among those to have fled to England during the 1848 revolution.

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Galerie Brame & Lorenceau, and will be included in their forthcoming De Dreux catalogue raisonné.