Marie Anne Augustine Aerts with Her Grandson Claude
Jean-Baptiste Soyer
Many years after Soyer painted this charming double portrait, the man who appears on it as a child remembered being cuddled by his grandmother and added a note to the miniature: “This was how I clambered onto my wonderful grandmother Aerts in order to kiss her.” It was important to him to keep the memory of his deceased grandmother alive and to remember the love and warmth she had given him as a small child.
Although only the family name of the elderly woman was given on the back of the miniature, she and her grandson were identified during the work on this catalogue. They are Marie Anne Augustine Aerts, née Lalance (1737 – 1811), and Claude Aerts (1800 – 1883). Marie Anne and her husband François lived in Nancy, where their son Charles Christophe (1777 – 1838) was born in 1777. He married Barbe Pétronille Denys (1783 – 1837), by whom he had a son, Claude (to be precise, Léon Claude), in 1800.1 Claude later ran a wholesale textile business in Metz. Soyer also painted portraits of his parents, Charles Christophe and Barbe Pétronille, at around the turn of the 19th century.2
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