Abner Leroy (1791-1831) "Un intérieur, apprêts de Chasse" 1829

Oil on canvas, signed lower left “Ab Leroy” and dated 1829
Bears a label inscribed n°377
Original canvas and stretcher: 57 x 50 cm
In its giltwood frame: 72 x 64 cm

Un interieur, apprêts de chasse was exhibited at the Douai Salon of 1829, listed with number 234. In a kitchen bathed in soft light, two men are busy with the final preparations for a hunting trip. With a hunting gun on his shoulder and a game bag slung over his shoulder, the first man is about to leave the house, accompanied by his pointing dog, a French pointer, which shows signs of great excitement, while the second man, standing in the background in front of a window, finishes filling a wicker-covered flask with wine.

Abner Leroy, sometimes referred to as "Leroy de Falvy," was born on 12 Nivôse An 7 (January 1, 1799) in Falvy, Somme department, into a Picard bourgeois family. His father Louis Leroy (1752-1815), a royal notary in Falvy and Athies under the Ancien Régime, councilor at the Présidial d'Artois, was mayor of the village. The youngest of his siblings, he had three brothers, who like their father, pursued careers in law. The eldest, Louis Amand Leroy de Falvy (1786-1855), served as a chamber president at the Royal Court of Douai during the Restoration period, then as president of the Imperial Court under the Second Empire; the second, Victor Aimé Leroy (1787-1876), succeeded his father as a notary in Athies, and the third, Sigismond Leroy, became a bailiff in Douai.
Also residing in Douai, Abner Leroy lived in a house on Rue des Procureurs, located near the Town Hall and its belfry, and dedicated himself to the art of painting. During his short career (he died prematurely at the age of 32 on July 6, 1831), he participated in several exhibitions held in northern cities, a region particularly active in France, compared to the rest of the country, in organizing Art Exhibitions (Salons) since the early 19th century; these events not only attracted local artists but also internationally renowned painters such as Géricault, Delacroix, Constable, and Navez. From 1817, an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and sculptures was held every two years in July in Douai, organized in the salons of the Town Hall, which was expanded to include Industrial products from 1825 onwards. Alternating with this, an exhibition was also held every two years in August by the city of Cambrai. Abner Leroy participated in these exhibitions regularly for 10 years, between 1821 and 1831. He was awarded a silver medal in Douai in 1827.

Abner Leroy, who painted portraits and landscapes, appears to have specialized in genre painting, particularly in the representation of interior scenes inspired by Dutch painting and its predecessors, painters such as Van Mieris, Gerrit Dou, Ter Borch, and Metsu, who were highly esteemed in the early 19th century. The precision of his work and the clear play of light place this artist in the Northern tradition, among those known as realist painters. Leroy's familiar reality, his meticulous attention to detail and lighting effects, also bear many similarities to the painting of Martin Drolling (1752-1817), "Interior of a Kitchen," 1815, presented in Paris a few months after the artist's death at the Salon of 1817, where it was acquired by King Louis XVIII. Abner Leroy belongs to the same generation as Drolling's daughter, the painter Louise-Adéone Drölling (1797-1834), and he is also close in his art to the painter Pierre Duval Le Camus (1790-1854), a native of Normandy, or the Lyonnais Anthelme Trimolet (1798-1866), who composed similar genre scenes.

The dual title chosen by the painter, An Interior, Hunting Preparations, highlights the duality of the subject. It is both a description of an interior and a representation of the final preparations for a hunting trip. Thanks to this meticulous description of a Northern French kitchen in the late 1820s, we are allowed to visit, as if we were there, this central room of French houses. With its potager kitchen stove located under the window, its cast iron stove lit at all hours of the day, reddened by the heat and crowned with a huge copper kettle providing hot water, not only for personal hygiene but also for cooking and beverages. The painter pays meticulous attention to the description of the numerous utensils and accessories and the careful rendering of textures and materials. Walls with yellow plaster, a floor paved with terracotta tiles, a shiny green glazed earthenware jar. Above the fireplace on a shelf, various lighting instruments: an oil flask, a painted tin oil lamp, characteristic of French manufactured objects from the early 19th century, a pair of silver snuffers on its tray; a bowl, a jug, and two lemons make up a small still life. Different pieces of tableware, bottles, and decanters are piled up in front of the window. Two hundred years later, it is a wonderful document on the art of living and interior architecture, which shows us in every detail the layout of this service room in a bourgeois house of the early 19th century.

It is in this trivial and familiar setting that these final hunting preparations are captured. A servant who finishes filling a flask, a dog ready to leap after its master, who, in a final movement, seizes a powder pear suspended on the wall. The hunter's attire is that of field hunting, for small game with fur and feathers. A green woolen jacket, sturdy canvas trousers, leather gaiters to protect against brambles, a round hat with wide brims to protect against rain or the glare of the sun. The man also practices waterfowl hunting, as indicated by the leather pants-boots strewn on the floor to the right and the pair of duck guns, which can be guessed, suspended in a case, from the main beam of the ceiling.

Abner Leroy pays particular attention to rendering light effects. Among his submissions to the Douai exhibition of 1827, two paintings entitled "An Interior Lamp Effect" are noted, and at the Cambrai exhibition of 1828, "Interior of Mr. L's Lawyer's Cabinet in Douai, Lamp Effect." In our painting, it is not artificial light but daylight that illuminates the room from the high window on the left of the painting. Abner Leroy plays with chiaroscuro effects, modulating shadows that emphasize the volume of the objects depicted and animate the silhouettes of his characters. He multiplies reflections on the surface of objects: the transparency of glass, the sheen of ceramics, the brightness of metal, the gleam of the hat.

This representation of a domestic scene of modern life is a perfectly preserved work - in its frame and on its original canvas - in which Leroy happily perpetuates this vein of genre painting, inspired by the art of the Dutch Golden Age, in the lineage of Drolling, Boilly, and Van Gorp. His taste for detail and the picturesque, his polished painting without being mechanical, a subtle attention to the various attitudes of the figures, make this artist equal to the best representatives of this type of painting, who, in the 1820s, sought to achieve "the incredible finesse" of Mieris and Gerrit Dou, in order to satisfy their contemporaries' pronounced taste for refinement and porcelain-like finish.