Jacques-Antoine Vallin (1760-1835) was a French painter of the generation that followed Greuze, Fragonard and Boucher- the leading painters of the so-called ‘gallant’ school. Lacking his predecessors’ talent, he followed in their footsteps- as we shall see.
Vallin was the son of a Parisian sculptor and engraver, so it was probably natural that, in 1779 at the age of fifteen, he entered the Royal Academy to study fine art. He received tuition under the painters Gabriel Francois Doyen (1726-1806)- known for his classical, religious and historical scenes- and Antoine-Francois Callet (1741-1823), who specialised in portraits, but also produced classical, historical and allegorical paintings. Vallin then assisted in the engraving workshop of the Drevet family and was a student of the playwright and painter Antoine Renou (1731-1806), who was something of an orientalist as well as painting biblical stories. The young Vallin was also influenced by the leading landscape painter Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714-89) and by his close contemporary Jean-Joseph-Xavier Bidauld (1758-1846). Bidauld also specialised in landscapes, but in addition produced some genre scenes and depictions of religious or mythical incidents which were much subordinated to their topographical settings. Vallin produced landscapes like theirs as the backgrounds to his own mythological paintings (see below).
Vallin did not exhibit his work at the Salon until 1791, when he was in his thirties. Despite this relatively slow start, he then very quickly established a style and a career, enjoying success with his paintings of scenes drawn from Greek and Roman myth- nymphs, fauns, minor divinities and bacchantes cavorting in classical landscapes. Examples are Offering to Bacchus, several canvases showing Venus & Cupid, as well as Silenus Drunk, Telemachus and Mentor on Calypso’s Island, an Arcadian Landscape, a Mythological Scene with Musical Nymphs, a Dance of Bacchantes and Putti, Dancing Satyrs in a Landscape, The Triumph of Amphitrite, Maenads with Putti in a Landscape, Pan and Syrinx and Erigone. This list of titles (and that of the historical paintings to follow) serves to impress upon us how different culture was then: potential buyers were expected to know who Erigone and Amphitrite were and to have a recollection of the key incidents in their stories. Today, that familiarity is lost, meaning that these can just seem like a string of meaningless names, even though they lie at the core of western culture.
Amongst this class of mythically-inspired image, single female figures were particularly popular- although, I’m sure showing off your knowledge of Ovid and Euripides came very much second to having a bit of bare flesh to admire on your wall. Examples include numerous bare-chested bacchantes and a Vestal with one bosom exposed. The picture at the head of this page shows a famous actress pretending to be one of the bacchae: as I’ve described before, this kind of dressing up was very popular around the end of the eighteenth century. Vallin also painted female nudes in interiors or bathing outdoors; his Allegorie de l’Automne best fits with this category of canvas.
The market for imitations of the work of Greuze- that is, of the head and shoulder paintings of ‘Greuze girls,’ young females whose bodices are frequently slipping off their shoulders and revealing their chests- was considerable. Vallin did not resist the opportunities to cash in. Greuze’s girls often have ecstatic expressions, which Vallin faithfully copied, as we can see in the second painting below. Greuze himself churned loads of these pot-boiler pictures and those copying him did just the same. In fact, you can’t even be sure of getting an authentic Vallin copy of a Greuze, as it’s might well to come from one of his pupils, the ‘studio of Jacques-Antoine Vallin’- a risk just as true of any of the famed painters as well.
The influence of Boucher is also powerfully evident in the surprisingly graphic Female Nude with a Letter. The young woman reclines naked on a chaise longue- looking very like Boucher picture of Marie-Louise O’Murphy; she has, it seems become extremely aroused by whatever was written in the letter: the sheets now rest neglected on her thigh whilst she is otherwise engaged… If the image was a photograph, you’d readily believe it was from a rather glossy photo-shoot for a men’s magazine with high production values and some aesthetic pretensions (Penthouse or Playboy in the 1970s, perhaps). Vallin’s painting of the Young Woman Swooned below is clearly a related picture.
Vallin also painted portraits and drew inspiration from ancient history , just as his mentors had done. Hence we have canvases such as Apelles Painting Phryne as Venus, Plato with his Disciples, King Antiochus and Stratonice, and, lastly, Queen Cleopatra. This final image shows how, towards the end of his life, Vallin began to imitate the technique of more modern and fashionable artists like Jacques-Louise David. Its dark background and marble-like flesh is very distinctive of the neo-classical style of the early nineteenth century.
What the career of Vallin most brings home to us is how those artists, who were not so skilled or so inventive as to be at the cutting edge of their craft, made a living (Oskar Heller was a slightly more recent example I discussed). They painted whatever they were asked to by customers (very often, of course, the subjects made fashionable by the leading painters) and they did so in the style that was in vogue at the time.
For more information on the peinture galante, see my Voyage to the Isle of Venus.
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