François-Nicolas DELAISTRE (Paris, 1746 - 1832) Philoctetes, in the Island of Lemnos, complaining to the Gods about the wound he got with Hercules' arrows, sketch for the piece of approval at the Academy, around 1785 Terra cotta. H. 34,5 x W. 20,5 x D. 19,5 cm Provenance : - Remained in the artist's descendants. - Sale Beaussant-Lefèvre, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, November 5, 2021, n° 104. Bibliography: - A. Jal, Dictionnaire critique de biographie et d'histoire, Paris, 1867, p. 483. - S. Darroussat, " François-Nicolas Delaistre (1746-1832) : sculptures retrouvées ou inédites, portraits de famille ", in Bulletin de la Société de l'Histoire de l'Art français, 2005, published in 2006, p. 117-122 and 142, reproduced p. 120-121. Related work: A more sketchy, less accomplished terracotta, using the same compositional idea but reversed, attributed to Delaistre, went on sale at Sotheby's, New York, on January 27, 2023, under no. 551. A student of Louis-Claude Vassé and Félix Lecomte, François-Nicolas Delaistre was already 26 years old when he finally won the Grand Prix de Sculpture in 1772, which allowed him to leave for Italy. At the French Academy in Rome, where he stayed between 1773 and 1777, he was noticed by the great collectors Bergeret de Grancourt and the Count of Orsay. On his return to Paris, these supporters enabled him to obtain important commissions and to live from his art, even though he was only admitted to the Academy in 1785. On this occasion, Delaistre presented a plaster cast of Philoctetes on the island of Lemmos, which his approval by the Academy allowed him to exhibit at the Salon in the same year. The subject was in the air since 1783. The performance at the Comédie Française of a successful tragedy by François de la Harpe, taken from Sophocles' Philoctetes, inspired many artists. They took up the fashionable theme of the male hero alone in the face of adversity. We can mention the sculptors Charles-Louis Corbet in 1782 or Barthélémy Corneille in 1790; the painters Jean-Joseph Taillasson in 1784 or Jean-Germain Drouais in 1788. Preserved by the artist's descendants until today, our terracotta sketch, the first thought for Delaistre's pleasure piece, was published in 2006 in a paper by Séverine Darroussat: François-Nicolas Delaistre (1746-1832): sculpture retrouvées ou inédites, portraits de famille. The sculptor represents here a Philoctetes abandoned on the island of Lemnos, sitting on a rock in a general composition reminiscent of the reception piece presented to the Academy thirty years earlier, in 1751, by his master Louis-Claude Vassé, Un berger endormi (marble, H.71 cm, Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. MR2111). The unfortunate hero is emaciated, his face tense, a pretext for Delaistre to study an expression: pain. The sketch is lively and expressive while maintaining a certain restraint that brings us back to the noble suffering contained in the Laocoon. The sculptor clearly shows here his adherence to Winckelmann's theories which support the heritage of Antiquity and a form of solemn restraint in pathos.