Provenance:

with Arnold Seligmann, Rey & Co. (according to label on the frame)
Brooke Astor (1902–2007), Cove End, Mount Desert Island
her sale, Thomaston Place, Maine: 28 August 2025, lot 1064 (as Joseph Ducreux)

Literature

Engraved: Jean-Daniel Beyer (1785–1846), Portrait de Christophe Guérin (Gallerie von Bildnissen ausgezeichneter Elsaesser aus Aelterer und Neuerer Zeit: Galerie Alsacienne…, Strasbourg, Johann Heinrich Heitz, 1825)

Note:

This painting has recently been identified as a portrait of the Strasbourg painter and engraver Christophe Guérin (1758–1831), by the sitter’s son Gabriel-Christophe Guérin (1790–1846) from 1822–5. Previously undocumented, the portrait’s existence was known through an engraving by Jean-Daniel Beyer (1785–1846), lithographed by Godefroy Engelmann (1788–1739) in 1825. The painting constitutes the sole confirmed portrait of the artist and a significant addition to Strasbourg’s artistic heritage. Shown in bust length against a dark background, the sitter, now in his sixties, wears a green coat and white cravat. His hands, dirtied with manual labour, rest on a copper plate, a burin held in one hand, a small pot in the other, with engraving tools laid out before him and a jug to the left, a detail which is not included in Beyer’s engraving.

Christophe and Gabriel-Christophe Guérin belonged to a dynasty that shaped artistic life in Strasbourg from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. The family included Christophe’s brother, the miniaturist Jean-Urbain Guérin (1761–1836), and his younger son, the painter Jean-Baptiste Guérin (1798–1867).

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