Jacques Clement Wagrez
(French, 1846/50-1908)

"Exercise of Intellect", 1902

oil on canvas
signed lower left, verso with "Kurt E. Schon Ltd., New Orleans, LA" gallery label.
Giltwood frame with artist and title plaque.
48" x 44", framed 58" x 53"

Provenance: Christie's, New York, New York, May, 1980, lot 69; Christie's, Ibid., October 25, 1984, lot 89; Christie's, Ibid., February 15, 1994, lot 42; Kurt E. Schon Ltd., New Orleans, Louisiana; Private collection.

Notes: All that glitters in the works of Jacques Wagrez is indeed visual gold of Renaissance grandeur past. Wagrez, a native Frenchman, entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1868 and excelled in the classical/historical genre under the Academicians Isidore-Alexandre-Augustin Pils, Alexandre Cabanal and Henri Lemann, a pupil of Ingres. He debuted at the Paris Salon of 1876 with a painting of "Eros", followed by numerous successive classical entries such as "Peace and War" "Education of Achilles" and "Perseus Conquering Medusa", until his maiden voyage to Italy in 1883. Wagrez was so captivated by the Italian Renaissance, particularly the Florentine and Venetian Schools, that it never left him. Wagrez's artistic raison d'etre in the years to follow was to capture the prevailing incantation of 16th century humanism that the divine was physically manifest in the beauty and symmetry of the earthly world, namely the individual- as God's greatest creation. The more opulent and beautiful the image, the closer to Godly perfection it could be. Silks, gold, and all the beautiful textiles and currencies that poured in from the Orient and the New World to the cosmopolitan ports of Venice, Genoa and Pisa, could indeed be a reflection and tribute of faith before the Protestant Reformation. Wagrez, with the virtuoso of King Midas, endeavors to capture the mysticism, abundance and intense color of Quattrocento Italian art in modern parlance and style that pays tribute to the Pre-Raphaelites in subject and execution and and to Art Nouveau with its linear and decorative "je ne sais quoi".

58 x 53 in