Dominique Antoine MAGAUD (1817-1899) - Lot 215

Dominique Antoine MAGAUD (1817-1899) Charity, 1858 Oil on canvas Signed D.A. MAGAUD and dated 1858 top left 85x107cm Exhibition: Probably exhibited at the Salon de Paris, Palais des Champs Elysées, in 1859. Magaud is a great 19th-century painter from Marseilles, now unjustly forgotten. A pupil of Léon Cogniet, he was director of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Marseille for twenty-seven years. Exhibited several times at the Salon, he also enjoyed a number of local successes, including major commissions for the Marseille Bourse de Commerce, the city's Cercle religieux and the Café des Mille Colonnes, among others. Our painting, dated 1858, depicts a richly-dressed, flower-decked young girl offering a cup to drink to a poor woman exhausted from working in the fields. It echoes a painting by Magaud entitled "Bienfaisance", exhibited at the 1859 Paris Salon. Here's how its biographer Ferdinand Servian describes it: "A poorly dressed woman is the object of the solicitude of an adorable child who looks at her with love and tries to read in her eyes the torment that makes them cry". Alas for Magaud, his works received little attention at the Salon. Admittedly, his highly academic style earned him commissions that promised a good career, while Gérôme, Meissionnier, Vernet and Delacroix triumphed. Delacroix, along with Courbet, struck critics again that year. The apostle of Romanticism and Realism would soon show the way to a new generation of painters, known as the Impressionists, who from the Salon des Refusés in 1863 advocated a different style of painting. It was above all their leader Edouard Manet who brought their art into the modern age. Literature: SERVIAN (Ferdinand), Magaud, l'artiste - le chef d'école - l'homme, Paris, Plon 1908. see quotation p. 30 SANCHEZ (Pierre) and SEYDOUX (Xavier), Les catalogs des Salons parisiens, VII 1859-1863, L'échelle de Jacob, 2004. From the catalog, p. 252, number 2060: - *Bienfaisance The Salon catalog for the same year specifies that Dominique Antoine Magaud's Bienfaisance was engraved (lithographed) by Pierre-Charles Vogt.