The Tansey Miniatures Foundation

Die Miniatur Über den Künstler

The Tansey Miniatures Foundation

DE
The Miniature About the Artist

Charles Jean-Baptiste Duchesne, Father of the Artist

Jean-Baptiste Joseph Duchesne de Gisors

In this unusual portrait, the 28-year-old Jean-Baptiste Joseph Duchesne depicted his father, Charles Jean- Baptiste. The elderly, almost bald man studies the painter, his son, with alert eyes. His arms are folded in front of his chest, and his hands are hidden in his coat. The slightly hunched pose gives the impression of a body marked by hard work.1
Charles Jean-Baptiste, the son of a tanner and leather dealer in Gisors, chose an artistic profession and became a sculptor.2 In 1770, he had a son, Jean- Baptiste Joseph, by his wife, Barbe Catherine Dudoüet. The father himself gave the gifted boy his first lessons in drawing.3 Later, Jean-Baptiste Joseph acquired more expertise in Paris, first with the painter François-André Vincent, and subsequently with the miniaturist Jean- Baptiste Jacques Augustin, and he became one of Augustin’s best students. Astonishingly, the young painter decided to marry in 1793, before he moved to Paris and established himself as an artist. He and his wife, Marie Louise Victoire Julie, née Olivier, had several children. Martin Archimède, who was born in 1794, later also pursued a career as an artist and worked as a painter in oils and in miniature.
B. P.

1 The miniature has a metal frame from the manufacturer Valette, which was created around ten years later than the miniature itself. Valette had his business “Au cadre mécanique” in Paris in the Rue Croix des Petits-Champs no. 41.
2 Two of his works can be viewed in the church of St. Josse in Parnes. They are wooden processional staffs with statuettes, which Duchesne created in 1784.
3 The author of Jean-Batiste Joseph Duchesne’s obituary emphasised incorrectly that Duchesne’s only teacher had been his father. Cf. „Duchesne (de Gisors.)“, in: L’Artiste, 6, vol. 2, 24 August 1856, p. 109.