Lot n° 76
Estimation :
4000 - 6000
EUR
Result with fees
Result
: 5 120EUR
Attributed to Jean François BOISSELAT (Paris, 1812- died aft - Lot 76
Attributed to Jean François BOISSELAT (Paris, 1812- died after 1851)
Portrait of Count François Barbé de Marbois (1745-1837)
Original canvas
64 x 62 cm
Son of a wholesale grocer who became director of the Mint in Metz, François Barbier de Marbois was born there on January 31, 1745. He was a diplomat posted to Regensburg, Dresden and Munich, then consul general in the United States in 1780. In 1784 he married Elizabeth Moore (1765-1834), daughter of a Pennsylvania banker governor, in Philadelphia. Appointed Intendant in Saint-Domingue in 1785, he remained there until the revolutionary events led him to return to France. His patrons, the Marquis de la Luzerne and the Marshal de Castries having emigrated, he was then forced to place himself at the service of the revolutionary government which sent him to Vienna in 1792. At the time of the Terror, he chose to resign and retired to Metz where he was mayor for a few months in 1795. He was a deputy and then President of the Council of Elders, but his reactionary attitude led him to be deported to Sinnamary in Guyana after the coup d'état of September 4, 1797. Reinstated in 1800, he joined the Council of State. Recognized for his integrity, he was appointed director and then minister of the Treasury.
In this position, in 1803, he successfully negotiated the cession of Louisiana to the United States, but the following years and the expenses related to the Napoleonic conflicts put him in difficulty and he was disgraced on January 27, 1806. This disavowal did not last, Napoleon recalled him in September 1807 to preside over the Court of Auditors. Although appointed to the Senate and made a count of the Empire in 1813, he was one of the four authors of the act pronouncing the Emperor's disqualification.
In June 1814, he was made a Peer of France by Louis XVIII and confirmed in his functions as President of the Court of Auditors until 1834. He was 89 years old when he retired, three years before his death. François Boisselat, a pupil of Hersent, exhibited at the Salon of 1836 a life-size Portrait of François Marquis de Barbé-Marbois, preserved in the Museum of Versailles (canvas, 215 x 141 cm, S.D. 1835). A work to the glory of the man who watched over the finances of France for so many years, its composition is close to the effigy that we are presenting. The episode of the prison of Sinnimary, a place that was the subject of a work by Barbier-Marbois, is obscured and replaced by a European landscape.
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