Diana, goddess of the hunt, was a model of female virtue and power, but she was also often eroticized, surrounded by her nymphs bathing in the forest. Nattier used her disguise when portraying many of his female sitters, layering contemporary hairstyles and makeup with studio props, including the bow, quiver, and panther skin. This portrait is among the most accomplished examples of this means of elevating a work out of the everyday. Its artifice and self-conscious performativity are characteristic of a society steeped in theater and masquerade. Bergeret de Frouville’s husband was an important patron of other leading French painters, including François Boucher and Hubert Robert.
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Title:Madame Bergeret de Frouville as Diana
Artist:Jean Marc Nattier (French, Paris 1685–1766 Paris)
Date:1756
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:53 3/4 x 41 3/8 in. (136.5 x 105.1 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Rogers Fund, 1903
Accession Number:03.37.3
Between 1730 and 1760, the period which marked Nattier's rise to prominence and his decline, he espoused two models for his portraits of women at Versailles and in wealthy Paris society. He showed these clients either in court or formal costume (that is, a lace or elaborately embroidered dress with an oval neckline, narrow sleeves to the elbow, and a tight, pointed bodice), or, in accordance with his own preference, he painted them in loose, low cut draperies and in allegorical guise. In either case they usually wore their short hair lightly powdered and ornamented with flowers. Nattier's preferred colors in addition to white were blue, ivory, and red, and his shiny fabrics look like satin. He used three formats, bust-, half-, and, as here, three-quarter length, the size best suited to his allegories. In the case of disguised portraits, the sitters were identified by their attributes, in this case the bow and quiver with arrows of Diana, virgin goddess of the hunt.
The lady's white draperies are fastened with a jewel-encrusted band, and the knotted leopard skin which must have been one of the artist's studio properties. The oak and twining ivy in the background are also typical.
The sitter for the present portrait had never been securely identified. However, a slightly smaller copy was sold at public auction in Vienna in 2018. At the upper right, painted on the copy, there were two small coats-of-arms, which proved to be those of the Bergeret and the de La Haye des Fossés families.[1] It thus became possible to identify the young woman as Elisabeth Marguerite Thérèse de La Haye des Fossés, who married in 1749 Jean François Bergeret de Frouville. She was born in 1733 and died in 1770.
Katharine Baetjer 2018
[1] The copy was brought to our attention by Ólafur Þorvaldsson, whose email of April 23, 2018, we gratefully acknowledge.
Inscription: Signed and dated (lower right): Nattier p.x. / 1756.
Albert Pioerron de Mondésir, château de Rochemont, Valognes, Manche (until d. 1901); [Gimpel & Wildenstein, New York, until 1903; sold to The Met]
Athens. National Pinakothiki, Alexander Soutzos Museum. "Treasures from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: Memories and Revivals of the Classical Spirit," September 24–December 31, 1979, no. 54 (as "Portrait of a Lady as Diana").
Versailles. Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. "Jean-Marc Nattier," October 26, 1999–January 30, 2000, no. 76.
"First Pictures Purchased by the $6,000,000 Rogers Bequest to The Metropolitan Museum of Art." New-York Tribune: Illustrated Supplement (May 10, 1903), pp. 5–6, ill.
Pierre de Nolhac. J.-M. Nattier: Peintre de la cour de Louis XV. Paris, 1905, p. 122 [1910 ed., p. 201], as an unknown woman, incorrectly identified as the princesse de Condé as Diana, recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum.
M. Mahiet. "Les Anciens hôtels Bergeret de Frouville et de La Haye: rue Béranger, nos 3, 5, et 5 bis Paris (3e)." La Cité: Bulletin trimestriel de la Société Historique et Archéologique des IVe et IIIe arrondissements de Paris 28 (January 1929), p. 257, ill. (cropped), reproduces our portrait as that of Madame Bergeret de Frouville, in the Mondésir collection at the château de Rochemont.
Georges Huard in "Nattier 1685 à 1766." Les peintres français du XVIIIe siècle: Histoire des vies et catalogue des oeuvres. Ed. Louis Dimier. Paris, 1930, vol. 2, p. 17, no. 139.
Josephine L. Allen and Elizabeth E. Gardner. A Concise Catalogue of the European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1954, p. 72.
Charles Sterling. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: A Catalogue of French Paintings. Vol. 1, XV–XVIII Centuries. Cambridge, Mass., 1955, pp. 121–23, ill.
René Gimpel. Diary of an Art Dealer. English ed. New York, 1966, p. 298, observes that his father's biggest sale of the 1902–03 New York season was to the Metropolitan Museum: this Nattier and a Largillière for $70,000.
John Pope-Hennessy. "Roger Fry and The Metropolitan Museum of Art." Oxford, China, and Italy: Writings in Honour of Sir Harold Acton on his Eightieth Birthday. Ed. Edward Chaney and Neil Ritchie. London, 1984, p. 231.
Margaret Robinson. Courbet's Hunt Scenes: The End of a Tradition. Providence, 1990, p. 18, no. 19.
Katharine Baetjer. European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Artists Born Before 1865: A Summary Catalogue. New York, 1995, p. 370, ill., as "Portrait of a Young Woman as Diana".
Xavier Salmon. Jean-Marc Nattier, 1685–1766. Exh. cat., Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. Paris, 1999, pp. 100, 184, 266–70, no. 76, ill. (color), by comparing their appearance, identifies the sitter here as Madame de Maison-Rouge, who sat for a portrait in the guise of Venus (Lynda and Stewart Resnick collection) which was exhibited at the Salon of 1757.
Xavier Salmon. "Le musée idéal." Dossier de l'art no. 62 (November 1999), p. 62, colorpl. 12.
J. Patrice Marandel inEye for the Sensual: Selections from the Resnick Collection. Exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Stuttgart, 2010, p. 127, under no. 29.
Bia Mankell. "Identitetslekar i porträttkonst / Playing with Identity in Portraiture." Gränslöst: 1700-tal speglat i nuet / Unbounded: The Eighteenth Century Mirrored by the Present. Ed. Kristoffer Arvidsson. Gothenburg, 2016, pp. 110–11, fig. 65 (color).
Diana J. Kostyrko. The Journal of a Transatlantic Art Dealer: René Gimpel 1918–1939. London, 2017, p. 147.
Neil Jeffares. Minutiae at the Met. March 29, 2019, unpaginated [https://neiljeffares.wordpress.com/2019/03/29/minutiae-at-the-met/].
Katharine Baetjer. French Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art from the Early Eighteenth Century through the Revolution. New York, 2019, pp. 89–93, no. 19, ill. (color).
Colin B. Bailey. "Review of Baetjer 2019." Burlington Magazine 163 (May 2021), p. 471.
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