Stella, Claudine Bouzonnet (1636-1697)
Pastorales
£3,528
Rare Books, Manuscripts, Maps & Photographs
Auction: 8 February 2023 at 10:00 GMT
Description
Paris: Claudine Stella, 1667. 17 plates (etchings with engraving) including pictorial title-page, all by Claudine Stella probably after Jacques Stella. Bound with:
Simpol, Claude (1666-c.1710). [Les Divertissemens et les occupations de la campagne]. Paris: Jean Mariette, c.1700. 16 plates (etchings with engraving), all unsigned but after Claude Simpol, showing the 12 months and 4 seasons each represented by an occupation or associated festival or ritual, with title and verses to foot, together with 4 similar plates also after Simpol ('Le Matin'; 'Le Midy'; 'Le Soir'; 'La Nuit'). And:
Cotelle, Jean (1642/6-1708). [Suite of genre scenes]. Paris: Jean Mariette, c.1700. 4 plates (etchings with engraving).
Oblong folio (sheet sizes 31.6 x 41cm, plate sizes 24.5 x 31cm or similar), 19th-century half sheep binding, binding marked, Stella title-page with early ownership inscription 'Ex libris Moynieu de Fourques No 15' and later ink-stamp to lower margin, plates 9 and 11-13 with grid-shaped ink markings
Footnote
Note:
An intriguing volume uniting inter alia two major suites of French pastoral prints both once thought to have been based on paintings by Jacques Stella (1596-1657), French neoclassicist and member of Poussin's circle, an attribution now questioned in one case and categorically dismissed in the other.
'In 1667 Claudine Bouzonnet Stella published Les Pastorales, a set of sixteen prints of rural subject-matter which have been called the chefs d'œuvre of the pastoral genre in seventeenth-century France ... Without Claudine's set of prints the profusion of pastoral imagery in the eighteenth century would be almost unthinkable. For such a landmark set of prints the Pastorales are not as well known as they could be, and this is perhaps due in part to the difficulty in allocating responsibility to the two artists involved. The prints are conventionally described as engraved by Claudine ... after a set of paintings by her uncle Jacques Stella ... But ... there may never have been a set of paintings, and perhaps the designer was Claudine rather than Jacques' (Mulherron, 'Claudine Bouzonnet, Jacques Stella and the Pastorales', Print Quarterly, XXV, 2008, 4, p. 393).
The first study of Claude Simpol appeared only in 1939 with the publication of an article by Helene Adhemar identifying him as an influence on Watteau. He was a pupil of the history painter Louis de Boullogne the Younger. In 2008 the two suites in this volume showing the four seasons and the twelve months were definitively attributed to him by Jamie Mulherron under the collective title 'Les Divertissemens et les Occupations de la Campagne' ('Claude Simpol's "Divertissemens" for Jean Mariette', Print Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 1, March 2008, pp. 23-36). They had previously been attributed to Jacques Stella and the question of their authorship had preoccupied art historians including Anthony Blunt.
The inclusion of the four prints by Jean Cotelle is especially noteworthy as Mulherron (q.v., p. 35) describes these 'the closest equivalent to Simpol's pastorals ... which have so far escaped all art-historical attention. These are slightly more rumbustious, more "Flemish" than Simpol's, but they are clearly in the same vein and supply the same niche'.