A SET OF LOUIS-PHILIPPE POLYCHROME-DECORATED BOISERIE PANELS

THE PAINTED DECORATION BY JEAN-CHARLES-MARIE JOURDEUIL, DATED 1836, WITH LATER ELEMENTS

Details

Featuring cream-painted panels decorated with with neoclassical trophies such as oil lamps, athéniennes, urns and acanthus-leaves over red and black-painted lower panels decorated with winged horses and scrolling cartouches, together with a collection of supporting decorative elements, one pilaster element inscribed in pencil on reverse '‘Bideau Major fecit / Jourdeuil pinxit / Carasson … / … / et … / … / Anno Domini 1836 / …’
95 1/4 in. (242 cm.) high, 38 3/4 in. (98.5 cm.) wide, the largest panel


Lot Essay

The inscription on the reverse of one of the pilasters of this set of boiserie panels reveals that their decoration was painted in 1836 by a certain Monsieur Jourdeuil. It is almost certain, that the artist in question is Jean-Charles-Marie Jourdeuil (1811-1868), renown collector, painter, professeur d'ornementation at the Ecole St. Pierre in Lyon, and director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts there. Jourdreuil lived and worked in St. Petersburg between 1845 and 1855, and it was there that his son Louis-Marie- Adrien, also a painter and architect, was born in 1849. Few identifiable or signed works survive by Jourdreuil senior, making these panels particularly rare and interesting.
For a stage design signed Jourdeuil Arch. see Christie’s, South Kensington, 15 December 2000, lot 157. This drawing features a complex capriccio of arcaded colonnades executed in the Etruscan style very similar to the painted decoration of these boiserie panels. Jourdreuil is most remembered as a collector of drawings and many works from his estate were sold by Sotheby’s in London 12-13 June, 1868. Some pieces from his extensive collection are now preserved at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, such as an early eighteenth-century design for picture frames (inv. 6699) and numerous interior elevations and plans from the Italian Renaissance and Baroque (invs. 6663, 6655, 6699). Among the drawings from his collection now at the Victoria and Albert Museum is a pilaster design in the “antique style” by Giuseppe Manocchi (c. 1731-1782) that relate to the decorative elements used by Joudeuil on the present panels (inv. 6706). For a drawing depicting antique classical ruins by Charles-Michelange Challe (1718-1878) formerly in Jourdeuil’s collection, see Christie’s, London, 5 December 2006, lot 81.
It is clear that Jourdeuil was heavily influenced by classical motifs of the Renaissance and the Neoclassical eras and that he had a very good understanding of their use and application. These panels were decorated in a Neoclassical taste with Etruscan roots that was still very much en vogue throughout Europe in the 1830s and 40s. The Italian influence on Joudeuil's decoration of this set is understandable as during his formative years and much of his activity in Lyon, his city bordered the Kingdom of Sardinia, situated just to the east of the Rhone river. Throughout the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, Neoclassicism was favored by the ruling Savoy family, who had their residences updated and refurbished in this style by leading craftsmen of the time. One such artist was Pelagio Palagi (1775-1860), whose interiors for the Palazzo Racconigi, such as the Gabinetto di Apollo, are decorated in a manner and color palette very similar to that of Joudeuil's panels offered here.