Attributed to Villers, Portrait of a Man, Probably Louis Auguste Juvénal des Ursins d’Harville, ca. 1784

Chicago:

Blythe Sobol, “Attributed to Villers, Portrait of a Man, Probably Louis Auguste Juvénal des Ursins d’Harville, ca. 1784,” catalogue entry in Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan, The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, vol. 1, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.2245.

MLA:

Sobol, Blythe. “Attributed to Villers, Portrait of a Man, Probably Louis Auguste Juvénal des Ursins d’Harville, ca. 1784,” catalogue entry. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan. The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, vol. 1, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.2245.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

This portrait of a previously unknown man probably depicts Louis Auguste Juvénal des Ursins d’Harville (1749–1815), based on its close resemblance to a portrait of d’Harville by Villers, dated 1784, at the Carnegie Museum of Art (Fig. 1).¹ The Nelson-Atkins miniature may be a high-quality copy due to its lack of a signature, although our ability to interpret its appearance, as the artist originally intended, is impacted by alterations and additions made by later restorers. The miniature was resized at some point, perhaps to fit it into the larger nineteenth-century frame;² the ivory support was inlaid onto a larger piece of card and overpainted to disguise this change.³ More closely cropped, the Carnegie miniature ends just below the sitter’s lacy white cravat. The two miniatures are also reversed, with the sitter’s queue falling to opposite sides of his shoulder in each portrait. While no print reproduction of these portraits has been identified, d’Harville, a well-known figure in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, was painted in large at least twice.⁴

Louis Auguste Juvénal des Ursins d’Harville was a French aristocrat, military officer, and politician whose democratic sympathies led him to switch sides and join the revolutionary cause in 1791.⁵ Later portraits of d’Harville in middle age exhibit the squared jaw and large, heavily lidded blue eyes of the Nelson-Atkins and Carnegie miniatures; this includes the depiction of his face by Jacques Louis David (1748– 1825) in his monumental 1807 painting Coronation of Napoleon I and Coronation of Empress Josephine, due to his appointment as First Equerry to the Empress.⁶

Notes

1. The artist Villers is known only by their signed surname, which appears on portrait miniatures dated between 1781 and 1793. We are grateful to Bernd Pappe for his observations on the miniature’s attribution and condition, and for calling our attention to this closely related miniature, during a July 23–25, 2023, visit. Notes in NAMA curatorial files.

2. According to conversations with visiting conservator Carol Aiken from 2017 to 2019. Notes in NAMA curatorial files.

3. See treatment report by conservator Stephanie Spence, 2018, NAMA curatorial files.

4. Unknown, Louis Auguste Juvénal des Ursins d’Harville, ca. 1809, oil on canvas, dimensions and location unknown, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Louis_Auguste_Juvénal_des_Ursins_d'Harville.jpg; Jacques Louis David, Coronation of Emperor Napoleon I and Coronation of Empress Josephine in Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, December 2, 1804, 1806–7, oil on canvas, 244 1/2 x 385 7/16 in. (621 x 979 cm), Louvre, Paris, https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010065720. D’Harville can be seen at the center of the painting, to the left of Étienne Hubert de Cambacérès, Archbishop of Rouen, who wears a tall white-and-gold bishop’s miter.

5. Jean-François Robinet, Dictionnaire Historique et Biographique de la Révolution et de l’Empire, 1789–1815 (Paris: Librairie Historique de la Révolution et de l’Empire, 1898), 2:142.

6. Frédéric Masson, Joséphine: Empress and Queen (New York: Goupil, 1899), 144. A study of d’Harville’s portrait for the coronation scene is at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard. Jacques Louis David, Comte d’Harville, General and Senator, 1805–24, black crayon, squared in black crayon, on off-white antique laid paper, 8 1/4 x 6 7/16 in. (21 x 16.4 cm), Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, 1943.1815.13.23, https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/190491. For the finished painting, see n. 4.

Mr. John W. (1905–2000) and Mrs. Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, by 1958;

Their gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1958.

Villers, Miniature of le Chevalier d’Harville, 1784, watercolor on ivory, 1 1/2 x 1 1/4 in. (3.8 x 3.2 cm), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 27.10.205.

Ross E. Taggart, ed., Handbook of the Collections in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 4th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1959), 265.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 202, p. 68, (repro.), as by unknown artist, Unknown Man.