Description
This double portrait depicts two brothers dressed in the height of fashion for the 1850s, clearly asserting their social status. Jean-Baptiste (left, age 23) carries gloves and a walking stick. René-Charles (right, age 25) wears an embroidered black velvet suit in the exotic à la grecque mode (in the Greek style) inspired by the Greek war of independence (1821–32). Flandrin represents the figures in an academic style emphasizing line over color, reflecting his training as a pupil of J. A. D. Ingres.
Provenance
By descent through the sitter's family; (W.M. Brady & Co. Inc., New York, NY, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art) (2000); The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (2000–)
Accession Number
2000.17
Medium
oil on canvas, original frame
Dimensions
Framed: 173.5 x 134 x 14 cm (68 5/16 x 52 3/4 x 5 1/2 in.); Unframed: 133.4 x 92.7 cm (52 1/2 x 36 1/2 in.)
Classification
Painting
Credit Line
Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund
Tags
Painting Neoclassical & Romantic (1751–1850) Oil Painting Canvas French
Background & Context
Background Story
Hippolyte Jean Flandrin (1809-1864) was a French painter known for the elegantly composed, precisely observed portraits that make him one of the most accomplished portrait painters of the 19th-century French Neoclassical tradition. Rene-Charles Dassy and His Brother from 1850 depicts the Dassy brothers in the elegantly composed, precisely observed manner that distinguishes Flandrin's best portrait work from the more general portraiture of his contemporaries. Flandrin was a student of Ingres who brought the elegantly composed, precisely observed manner of the Neoclassical tradition to portraiture, and his double portrait of the Dassy brothers shows the French portrait tradition at its most elegantly composed.
Cultural Impact
Rene-Charles Dassy and His Brother is important in the history of French portrait painting because it demonstrates the elegantly composed, precisely observed manner that Flandrin—a student of Ingres—brought to portraiture as one of the most accomplished portrait painters of the 19th-century French tradition. Flandrin's elegantly composed, precisely observed portraits—combining the Neoclassical tradition of his master Ingres with a precisely observed treatment of his sitters—represent one of the most accomplished traditions in French portrait painting, and the 1850 painting shows this tradition at its most elegantly composed.
Why It Matters
Rene-Charles Dassy and His Brother is Flandrin's elegantly composed Neoclassical portrait: the Dassy brothers depicted in the precisely observed manner of one of the most accomplished portrait painters of the 19th-century French tradition. The 1850 painting shows the Neoclassical tradition of Ingres at its most elegantly composed.
