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Paintings and drawings from the 17th to the 19th century
Constance MAYER (Chauny, 1774 – Paris, 1821)
A Little Girl at Prayer
Circa 1799. Oil on canvas. H: 47; W: 38 cm.
Exhibition: Salon des Artistes Vivants, Paris, 1799, no. 220: “A Little Girl at Prayer.”
A pupil of Joseph-Benoît Suvée and then of Jean-Baptiste Greuze, whose studio on Rue des Orties she attended alongside Anna Greuze, Caroline Tochon, and Jeanne-Philiberte Ledoux, Constance Mayer was still working in her early style when she painted this Little Girl at Prayer, before her meeting with Pierre-Paul Prud'hon in 1801–1802. The daughter of Pierre Mayer, the Prince of Hohenlohe's resident representative in Paris, and, through her mother, the niece of Alexandre Lenoir, founder of the Musée des Monuments Français, she had begun her artistic training in the late 1780s and had exhibited at the Exposition de la Jeunesse in 1791, before entering Greuze's studio following Suvée's departure for Rome.
This period remains poorly documented, for a specific reason. After the artist's suicide in 1821, Prud'hon organized a retrospective of her work and then died the following year. In the decades that followed, most of her early production was gradually absorbed into the master's oeuvre: Charles Gueullette reported that a dealer admitted selling her works as Prud'hons, and that one of her signatures had been erased and replaced with that of the painter. Her Greuze-inspired expression studies were attributed to the “circle of Greuze.”
The subject belongs directly to Greuze's devotional vein, that of Morning Prayer (Musée Fabre, Montpellier) and his countless heads of young girls with clasped hands, in which the ideal of pure faith is tinged with a deliberately ambiguous adolescent sensuality. Mayer fully embraces this tradition: she exhibited A Little Girl at Prayer at the Salon of Year VII (1799, no. 220), alongside A Young Woman Surprised by a Gust of Wind (no. 221), two compositions with which our painting shares both spirit and execution.
Everything here points to the hand of Greuze's former pupil, as defined by Sylvain Laveissière: a dry handling characteristic of works predating her encounter with Prud'hon. The abundance of reddish-blond hair held back by a coral-colored headband, the porcelain-like flesh with rosy half-tones, the large upturned eyes and small vermilion mouth, the classical grey-blue drapery treated in broad, flat areas of color, and finally the powerful, almost theatrical directional lighting that creates sharply defined, unsoftened shadows: all these features appear identically in the signed self-portrait in the Bibliothèque Paul-Marmottan, a “masterpiece of the collection” and a reference work for this Greuze-inspired period of the artist's career. Even the somewhat constrained pose, characteristic of her handling at the time, can be recognized.
At the Salon of Year VII, Mayer presented, in addition to our Little Girl at Prayer (no. 220), A Young Woman Surprised by a Gust of Wind (no. 221). We propose identifying the painting below as that work. The same porcelain-like flesh, the same golden hair, the same stark lighting, the same sharply defined shadows.
The Portrait of the Artist's Father, exhibited at the Salon of 1798 (no. 296), reappeared at auction on April 27, 2017, under the attribution “circle of Greuze.” Its features (the powdered hairstyle, elongated face, and gaze) correspond exactly to those of the father depicted by Constance Mayer in her Self-Portrait with Her Father of 1801, which, in our opinion, restores the authorship of the work to the artist.
