Jean-Baptiste LALLEMAND

(Dijon 1716 - Paris 1803)

Design for the Frontispiece for the 'Divers habillements suivant le costume d’Italie' of 1768

Sold
Pen and brown ink and brown wash, extensively heightened with white gouache, with traces of an underdrawing in black chalk.
Inscribed Pütz, peintre du duc de Deux Pon(?) on the verso.
324 x 230 mm. (12 3/4 x 9 in.)

ACQUIRED BY THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON, DC.
This is a preparatory design by Jean-Baptiste Lallemand, with significant differences, for the frontispiece of the print series Divers Habillements suivant le costume d'Italie. Dessinees d’apres Nature par J. B. Greuze Peintre du Roi, Ornés de Fonds par J. B. Lallemand et gravés d'après les Desseins tirés du Cabinet de M. l'Abbe Gougenot, etc. par P. E. Moitte, graveur du Roi, Paris 1768. The series was made up of prints after watercolours by Jean-Baptiste Greuze of the colourful costumes of women of the Italian provinces. For the prints, Lallemand added elaborate backgrounds to each of Greuze’s costume studies, all of which – with the exception of the title page, which was engraved by Lallemand himself – were engraved by Pierre-Etienne Moitte and published in 1768.



An impression of the related etching by Lallemand is sold with this drawing.







Relatively little is known of the life of Jean-Baptiste Lallemand. Born in Dijon, he settled in Paris in 1744, and the following year became a member of the Académie de Saint-Luc in Paris, where he exhibited landscape paintings in 1751 and 1764. Ther most significant influence on his artistic development, however, was the period that he spent in Italy. He arrived in Rome around 1747, possibly in the company of the painter Jean Barbault, and there achieved much success as a painter of Roman and Neapolitan views, several of which were sent to be exhibited in Paris. Among his important Roman patrons were the Pope and Cardinal Neri Corsini. On his return to France in 1764, Lallemand continued to work as a landscape painter, painting views of Paris, as well as scenes in Burgundy, the Franche-Comté and around Lyon, many of which served as illustrations for Jean-Benjamin de Laborde’s Voyage pittoresque en France, published between 1781 and 1800. He was in England in 1773, where he exhibited at the London Society of Artists, and also made a number of later visits to Italy. The 18th century collector and connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette noted of the artist that his landscapes ‘exécutées à guazze n’etoient pas sans merité.’ Late in his career Lallemand produced topographical drawings of views in the Franche-Comté, Burgundy and Lyon, intended as designs for prints.



As a draughtsman, Lallemand produced numerous Roman views which echo the works of Giovanni Paolo Panini and, more obviously, Hubert Robert, who is almost certain to have met Lallemand in Rome.

Literature

Hélène Guicharnaud, ‘Un collectionneur Parisien, ami de Greuze et de Pigalle, l’Abbé Louis Gougenot (1724-1767)’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, July-August 1999, p.19.



Jean-Baptiste LALLEMAND

Design for the Frontispiece for the 'Divers habillements suivant le costume d’Italie' of 1768