Le Carpentier emerges from the shadows

This intimate canvas by a pupil of David’s beat the odds and outshone the religious panel by an anonymous Flemish artist.

We were expecting the Master of Paul and Barnabas (see Gazette n° 15), but it was this canvas by a confidential painter that created the surprise. While the former saw his Adoration of the Magi fetch €39 ,000 , he had to bow to this work by Paul Claude Michel Le Carpentier, which fetched €49,400, well short of its high estimate of €8 ,000 : a result that earned it second place in Artprice’s list of the artist’s best works, of which there are only six . On the back of the painting, a label gives some information : ” Painted around 1830 by Paul Carpentier (…) represents his wife née Gignoux with her child. In a studio on rue de Lancry (…) Grand-père Carpentier, who was a painter and student of David, married his daughter to M. Rolland. The young girl on the canvas is therefore my great-grandmother. E. Denant 1948 “. The painting, exhibited at the Salon of 1827, represents a new milestone in the work of this still little-known artist. Born in Rouen in 1787, Le Carpentier trained with Jean-Jacques Le Barbier, then briefly with Jacques Louis David. In 1820, he married Adèle Clémence Gignoux (1801-1849), the daughter of a building contractor, with whom he had one child, Marie Victoire Clémence (1822-1892). She married the architect François Victor Rolland (1806-1888). Here, the artist chooses to depict his wife and daughter, aged around five , in his Parisian studio, loaded with sculptures and paintings. On the back wall, partly truncated by the frame of a large canvas occupying the entire left-hand side, we see a small painting. This is Venus, Cupid and Bacchus, an 1832 canvas sold by Beaussant-Lefèvre on February 4, 1998, in a pair with Le Sommeil d’Endymion for 90,000 F au marteau (approx. €21,200 in updated value). A few years after the execution of our work, the artist depicted himself with his wife and daughter in a painting from 1833, sold by Audap-Mirabaud on Friday November 21, 2014 and acquired for €75,120 by the Dallas Museum of Art (2014.38.FA), still the artist’s record price.