RAOUX Jean (Montpellier 1677 - Paris 1734) L'Enfance Oil on - Lot 21

RAOUX Jean (Montpellier 1677 - Paris 1734) L'Enfance Oil on canvas H. 89 L. 122 cm Provenance: Sotheby's New York, January 28, 1999 (catalog no. 290) Related to the composition L'Enfance from the cycle Les Quatre Ages de la Vie (1714 1715) commissioned from Jean Raoux by Philippe de Vendôme, Grand Prior of the Order of Malta, and engraved in counterpart by Jean Moyreau (1740) (Cf. Antoine Joseph Dezallier d'Argenville, Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres, T. IV, pp.375 376 - Paris 1762). Moyreau's engraving is accompanied by ten verses, some of which emphasize the children's games: Dans les bras de sa Mère, une jeune enfant badine ( ) L'une de sa poupée arrange l'attitude / L'autre enflele du Savon des globes pleins de vent. Valued enough to earn Jean Raoux admission to the Académie Royale as a history painter (1717), the Quatre Ages cycle was the subject of autographed replicas according to the testimony of Dezallier d'Argenville, which seems to be confirmed by their presence in the most famous collections of the second half of the 18th century: Gaillard de Gagny (1762), the Duc de Deux Ponts (1778), Leboeuf (1783) and the engraver Beauvarlet (1798) (Cf. Catalog of the exhibition Jean Raoux, un peintre sous la régence, pp.102 103 Musée de Montpellier 2009 2010). The Musée de Montpellier conserves the early version of La Vieillesse, of similar dimensions (87 x 128.9 cm), probably the first of the cycle to have been painted in 1714 in Rome (Cf. idem, p.98 & 102).