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Wall Panel with Doves

On display in:

East Boudoir

Order image © All images subject to copyright

attributed to

Peyrotte, Alexis (b.1699, d.1769)

style of

Pillement, Jean Baptiste (b.1728, d.1808)

Date

1750-1770

dated stylistically

Place of production

  • France

Medium

  • oil on canvas

Type of object

  • paintings

Accession number

161.1996.5

One of five panels of birds surrounded by blue decorative cartouches. In the centre, there is an oval with a landscape scene of three doves: one standing on a cage, one seated on a nest and one in flight. Trees and two flower pots on a low stone wall appear behind.There is a shallow bowl and two eggs in the foreground.

The oval is surrounded by oval husk garlands and palm fronds. It depends from a red and blue floral festoon emanating from a central acanthus leaf motif in the upper edge of a rectangular cartouche. The upper part of the cartouche is composed of lines, S-scroll acanthus leaves at the corners, foliage, and husk garlands entwined with plant stems.

Beneath the oval, there are crossed plant stems and three acanthus leaf pendants. The lower sides of the cartouche are composed of simple elongated husks. The lower edge of the cartouche is composed of a plinth with curved sides edged with C-scroll acanthus leaves flanking a central scallop shell surmounted by roses and other flowers.

Commentary

Summer flowers and birds decorate eleven canvas panels attributed to the French ornamentalist painter, Alexis Peyrotte. Six panels show rose bushes on simple patches of ground (acc. nos 140.1996.1-6). Five are more complex, depicting birds surrounded by verdant cartouches (acc. nos 161.1996.1-5). Panels of elegant fowl, plants and rose bushes are combined in a similar fashion in a design for an octagonal boudoir traditionally attributed to Peyrotte, also at Waddesdon (acc. no. 1881).

As an interior decorator working in the Rococo idiom, Alexis Peyrotte contributed to several royal schemes: at Choisy-le-roi and Versaille in the 1740s, and at Fontainebleau, where he painted floral elements and allegorical trophies in the Salle du Conseil in 1753, alongside Carle van Loo. The panels at Waddesdon show the influence of the restrained neo-classical taste fashionable from the late 1750s on. The Waddesdon drawing (acc. no. 1881) has a similar transitional feel, and may have been a reworking of one of Peyrotte's decorative schemes made in the late 1760s or early 1770s. It was around this time when Jean-Baptiste Pillement's designs of fantastical birds and flowers became popular, although Pillement used chinoserie patterns to organise his designs, a feature lacking in the Waddesdon panels.

Peyrotte also produced satirical paintings of monkeys and birds, including turkeys, similar to those featured in the Waddesdon panels. Peyrotte's gouache of a monkey dressed as a Franciscan monk preaching to turkeys with a fox looking on, although very different in tone, shows a similar understanding of the decorative qualities of farmyard birds (Sotheby's, New York, 25 January 2006, lot 145).

The panels originally decorated Dorothy de Rothschild's bedroom in St James's Place, London, bought around 1930, when they were considered to be in the style of Pillement. They were moved to Waddesdon in the mid 1990s. All of them except two concave panels (acc. nos 140.1996.5-6) have been installed into the panelling of the East Boudoir in the Bachelors' Wing. Conservation work carried out in 1997 revealed that the canvas surrounding the central designs had layers of different coloured paint, indicating that the panels had been used in several different interiors.

Phillippa Plock, 2012

Physical description

Dimensions (mm) / weight (mg)

1590 x 720
1560 x 700 - sight

Signature & date

not signed or dated

History

Provenance

  • Acquired by James de Rothschild (b.1878, d.1957) for 23 St James's Place, London; inherited by his wife Dorothy de Rothschild (b.1895, d.1988); then to a Rothschild Family Trust.

Collection

  • Waddesdon (Rothschild Family)
  • On loan since 1996