Antoine Duclaux, Empire period miniature, Woman with XIXth century Earring

  

Charming miniature painted in gouache depicting the portrait of a young woman at the beginning of the 19th century dressed in the transition fashion of the Directoire and Empire. She wears a very low-cut dress revealing the roundness of her chest, her hair is in curls tied with a pearl hairpin, and she wears a dangling pearl earring. Delivery €14 in France, €25 in the EU, and €50 for the rest of the world.

Width: frame 15 cm, view 9.5 cm Height: frame 16 cm, view 10.5 cm. According to Wikipedia: Under the Terror, the Duclaux family was persecuted and expelled from Lyon.

They took refuge in Burgundy, in Charrecey, where they owned the Chandelux estate. They lived quite miserably and had to rely on the charity of their vineyard workers. Several relatives of the Duclaux family were guillotined and shot in the Lyonnais region.

It can be understood that the painter's youth, overshadowed by the alienation of his father, the death of his two brothers, the massacres in Lyon, and the lack of money, shaped his character with a certain disenchantment often tinged with irony. His mother did not consider the possibility that her only surviving son could dedicate his life to painting. In 1800, she made him enter a trading house, but it did not meet the young man's aspirations.

Around 1805, he had the opportunity to go to Naples as the secretary of General Fursy Compère. He may have met the latter during the passage of the First Consul in Lyon, to whom he would have offered Duclaux's first known painting, representing a horse.

He spent two years at the Court of Joseph Bonaparte, where his talent as a draftsman was affirmed. During his stays at his country house in Vourles, between 1830 and 1850, and at the manor of Moncorin with his cousin Léonard-Alexandre Olphe-Galliard, he engraved, drew, and painted landscapes of the village and its surroundings.

Antoine Duclaux is buried in Lyon at the Loyasse cemetery, in the Testenoire chapel, where the sculptor Joseph Fabisch is also laid to rest.