Joseph CHRISTOPHE (Verdun 1662 - Paris 1748) - Lot 45

Joseph CHRISTOPHE (Verdun 1662 - Paris 1748) Le jeu du gage touché Canvas. Old restorations. 96.8 x 118.5 cm History: possibly the painting exhibited at the Salon de l'Académie royale de peinture et sculpture in 1704 (Liste des Tableaux et des ouvrages de sculpture exposés dans la Grande Galerie du Louvre (?) en la présente année 1704, Paris, 1704, p. 28 "Joseph Christophe (?), Le jeu du gage touché"). Following in the footsteps of Bon Boullogne (1649-1717), of whom he was a pupil, Joseph Christophe was one of those artists at the Académie Royale who blurred the separation between traditional pictorial categories, producing paintings of history as well as genre scenes. and genre scenes evocative of Dutch art. Accepted into the Académie Royale in 1702 with Persée tranchant la tête de la gorgone Méduse (Tours, Musée des Beaux-arts), Joseph Christophe had the opportunity to demonstrate his demonstrate the diversity of his talents at the Salon of 1704. Alongside six history paintings (the majority of which were mythological), he included three genre scenes, one of which is entitled Jeu du Gage game. Traditionally, participants in this game would give small objects as tokens to a member of the company, who would then hide them. In our painting, the "pledge keeper" is none other than the young woman The objects hidden in the hat revealed a necklace and ribbon. One of the players had to touch one of the objects without seeing it, and order a participant to be kissed, for example. As soon as the object was revealed, its owner had to comply with the order. The person concerned in our painting is obviously the young man seated on the left, since the order was to kiss his embarrassed neighbor. At the time, the game was fashionable, as the writer Eustache Lenoble had just published a book entitled Le Gage touché, histoires galantes in 1697. Joseph Christophe's art had been almost totally forgotten, but in recent years we've been rediscovering the importance of his art in his own time. Beyond the blurring of genres, Christophe's eclectic style is striking. The painter's reception piece (1702) shares virtually nothing with La Chasse aux canards par de jeunes garçons and its counterpart, Le Retour de Chasse, both of which are contemporaries, having been exhibited at the Salon of 1704 (the pair was at Galerie Perrin, Paris, in 2005; see Fr. Marandet, "Joseph Christophe, peintre de genre et peintre d'histoire", La Revue des Musées de France, October 2008, pp. 79-87). The spinning greyhound in our painting reappears identically in Le Retour de Chasse, again in the corner of the composition. On the right, the detail of the twigs, which appear to be separated from the foliage, is emblematic of the painter's work. We would like to thank Mr. François Marandet for writing this note and for his help in attributing this painting.