ANTONIO CANOVA
Self-portrait of Giorgione, 1792
Jacques Antoine LEMOINE (attributed)
Portrait of the violinist Jacques Pierre Joseph Rode, c. 1810
oil on canvas
92 x 72 cm
This captivating portrait, dating back to the first decade of the 19th century, stands out for its superior painterly quality. The incredible attention paid to all the details and their tasteful execution is evident at a first glance: the care over the finish of the suit, the precision with which the score is readable, the depth of the intense look of the subject portrayed.
Certain details allow us to restrict the year when it was painted to the early 19th century, such as the young man’s so-called à-la-Brutus hairstyle, a style which the new consul Napoleon adopted after returning from his Egyptian campaign. This meant cutting off his pigtail, shortening his hair, and combing it forward, like an ancient Roman consul. French men’s fashion at the beginning of the century exemplified this precise period. The jacket, a so-called “habit dégagé”, buttoned over the chest only and ended at the level of the waistcoat below it, i.e. on the stomach. The long tails were attached further back compared to a traditional tailcoat, giving the figure a greater dynamism. The collar of the waistcoat, stiff and erect, reveals a carefully knotted cravat, a little slimmer than in previous years. The trousers clung to the thighs and were inserted into boots, like the military uniforms of the day.
As for the identity of the sitter, thanks to extensive research and the aid of musicians and scholars, we have been able to identify the character portrayed in this superb painting as the French violinist and academic of the fledgling Paris Conservatory of Music, Jacques Pierre Joseph Rode (1774-1830).
Henri Grévedon (1776-1830)
French violinist Jacques Pierre Joseph Rode, Lithograph, 1827
Rode’s musical inventions – together with his colleagues Pierre Baillot (1771-1842) and Rodolphe Kreutzer (1766-1831) he developed a violin method published in 1803 that is still in use today – continue to play a fundamental role in the technical/practical learning of this instrument.
The 24 caprices for violin that he composed are still considered fundamental for a sound technical and musical training in learning the instrument.
Admired for his extraordinary technical skill and compositions, from around 1790, the peak of his professional success, Rode lived the itinerant life of a virtuoso acclaimed everywhere in France and beyond. In 1800, he was appointed solo violinist for the Musique Particulière of the First Consul, Napoleon, and was briefly the solo violinist at the Opéra. Between 1804 and 1808, he stayed in Russia, where he was appointed court violinist to Tsar Alexander I (1777-1825). After his return to Paris, he began to travel around Europe. In Vienna, at the end of 1812, he performed together with the youngest son of Emperor Leopold II, Archduke Rudolph Johann Joseph Rainier of Habsburg-Lorraine, who accompanied him on the piano; between 1814 and 1821 he was in Berlin, where he met and married his wife and became a close friend of the Mendelssohn family.
The attribution to the portrait painter Jacques-Antoine-Marie Lemoine (1751-1824) has been postulated by a French art historian and documentary film-maker who reports that, in 1810, the portrait painter Jacques-Antoine-Marie Lemoine (1751-1824) exhibited at the Paris Salon a portrait of the violinist Rode together with a second portrait of the well-known cellist Jean-Henri Levasseur, known as “the younger” (1764 - 1826).
Entered together with the portrait of the cellist Levasseur under no. 111 on the list of works submitted by Lemoine to be exhibited at the Salon, as “Le Moine rue J.J. Rousseau Hotel Ballion Ritratti di MM. Rode e Le Vasseur”, regrettably, whoever logged the entry did not indicate the measurements of the canvases; we therefore have no idea what size they were, whether they were small or large-format works as in the case of our painting.
List of works submitted by Lemoine to be exhibited at the Salon.
