HOLLAND ECOLE circa 1680, follower of Pieter de HOOCH - Lot 86

HOLLAND ECOLE circa 1680, follower of Pieter de HOOCH The drawing lesson Canvas. 48.5 x 41 cm Provenance : Very old collection of a French aristocratic family. Our painting can be dated between 1675 and 1685, based on the feminine hairstyle in the foreground (known as "à la hurluberlu") and the costumes. In the foreground, a seated young woman is drawing a bouquet of flowers in front of her. Beside her, a painter in a coat and red bonnet appears to be guiding her work. This scene illustrates how women learned to paint in the second half of the 17th century. In Holland, access to the guilds was reserved for men; women generally trained in a family or private setting, like Rachel Ruysch, a pupil of Willem van Aelst, or Maria van Oosterwijk, who studied with Jan Davidsz de Heem. These women were numerous: of the four hundred Dutch floral artists recorded between the 16th and 18th centuries, fewer than 50 were women (Colonel M. H. Grant, Rachel Ruysch 1664-1750, London, F. Lewis Publishers, 1996, p. 19). Rare examples of subjects similar to ours include Jan Steen's The Drawing Lesson in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; another painting by Steen, Interior with a Painter and his Family, in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (U-K); and The Drawing Lesson by Jan van Mieris, (unlocated, Margreet van der Hut, Jan van Mieris (1660-1690), KVMA, 2021, p. 79, no. 23). The vase containing the bouquet is in fact a spherical mirror, a symbol of artistic apprenticeship, enabling the painter to demonstrate his technical virtuosity, his mastery of perspective and image distortion. This motif, which appeared in Flemish painting in the 15th century, reflects the interior while including a self-portrait. A sheet of paper, wedged beneath the vase, reveals an academic male model, drawn in black stone, perhaps echoing the ban on women studying nudes from life, a fundamental step in the training of their male colleagues. This wink underlines the constraining reality of women's confinement to genres considered "minor", reducing their professional career opportunities. In the background, we see another woman, in an enfilade room, painting a landscape on an easel, another pictorial genre considered "minor" and therefore accessible to women. This demonstration brings to mind Maria Schalcken's Self-Portrait (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), in which she proudly poses in front of her finished painting of a forest landscape. The back view also evokes an anonymous Dutch painting, Jeune femme au chevalet, in the Musée du Petit Palais in Paris (inv. no. DUT 941). Expert : Cabinet Turquin.